


the flood

by evilstories



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Blood Communion Spoilers, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Discussions Of Existence In The Metatext, M/M, Missing Scene, No Human Sex Acts, but plenty of nonhuman sex acts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:01:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 42,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21951103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilstories/pseuds/evilstories
Summary: Louis comes to in a castle by the sea and his abductor just wants to have a little fireside chat about some changes to the present narrative that they could enact together.
Relationships: Rhoshamandes/Louis de Pointe du Lac
Comments: 30
Kudos: 56





	1. delivered in a firm unyielding way-

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings for the entirety of this fic include: vampire-specific social dynamics adjacent to ableism, discussions of domestic abuse, discussions of suicidiality & suicidal ideation, sublimated or misplaced misogyny, gaslighting/manipulation & some gore. These warnings, as well as that for rape/non-con, are here for a reason.

**I.** He had begun to come to perhaps ten, fifteen minutes ago, he wasn’t quite sure- rare is the immortal with a knack for time, and Louis had struggled with it even in life. Plus he had possibly been drugged. What _had_ Rhoshamandes done to his body to make his limbs feel still so leaden and heavy, his mind so foggy? Consciousness seemed to be taking an eternity to trickle back into him. Only now was he realizing his eyes were open.

Louis stared blearily upwards, at some collection of shadows and velvet and wormeaten wood, and waited for his vision to focus. Cool silk pressed against his cheek. He lay cradled in a bower of wine-colored cushions, swathed in the heavy dark of a four-poster whose thick drapes had been drawn closed. Through a slit in the bloodred velvet a single sliver of light spilled in; Louis’ eyes made out, above him, a tester so pockmarked and ancient he could see the landscape of its age even in the dark. The shadows were soft and tomblike, and, lulled by this funereal security, he closed his eyes again, willing himself to drift into a mortal nap in this comfortable place. It would be much better than being awake, alive and _remembering_. Outside the enclosure of warmth, he felt that chill that had lived permanently in every stone building before the miracle of central heating. Louis rolled over and, in revolt against the reality of the night, buried his face in the thick pillows.

In the hot darkness of half-sleep it was easy to envision himself somewhere safe and make-believe, dozing in a dream. Perhaps he’d simply drifted off while reading; perhaps he waited for his lover to return, and would wake to a kiss. Louis had laid in so many luxurious and shadow-nested beds in his immortal life- all left to the imagination was who this bed belonged to. Maybe the safety of this arrangement _was_ the make-believe part. But the mustiness of the sheets was pleasant, and he allowed himself to be transported by its scent into long-past times. From somewhere he smelled a creeping acridity, too, not unlike the old gaslamps- but not quite. Pitch, that was it, not gas: birch pitch, for the torches they’d used before gaslight, in that manor in Louisiana in that other life. 

Louis sat up suddenly, eyes open, wired stiff with instinctive physical panic. In the dark his sleep-addled vision swam, and he fought a wave of dizziness.

His body knew suddenly knew a profound, overwhelming fear which his mind, lacking the consciousness to process terror, could provide no reason for. Louis’ breath came in short gasps as the uncomfortable sharpness of preternatural sight returned. Inside of a four-poster bed. Red velvet drapes, bone-white sheets and wine-colored pillows, the soothing weight of an ochre comforter- slight tremble of his hands against the silk- and then, a sudden jolting remembering. The fog lifted and took his breath with it, the return of memory like a blow to the chest: Gabrielle de Lioncourt was dead. 

Louis was awake instantly and entirely, inertia of the death-sleep be damned. He’d seen the casket and its morbid contents earlier that evening, before Fareed had spirited it away to their makeshift little lab in the Chateau. Sick fascination had compelled him to see what it contained for himself, and when he’d opened the lid the braid had laid there at the bottom of the box like a hacked-off limb- it had seemed that intimately violent; and when Louis recalled the hollow echo of Lestat’s voice later that night it was like remembering that he had been stabbed in the ribs. 

He sat up stiffly in the sheets, staring dead ahead as he processed the events of the last night-and-a-half. Benedict, blind, bloody and brilliant in the ballroom- and then Rhoshamandes, wildeyed with rage- and then Gabrielle gone, and the braid that lay at the bottom of the box with all the grotesquerie of a taxidermy trophy. How long ago had that all been? How had he gotten here? More importantly- _where_ was here? The panic his body had been quicker to know than his brain had finally found its name. Pitch torches, cold walls, musty beds: this was not Lestat’s fairy-tale necropolis. Louis had been kidnapped, and he recalled still the firm hands on his body which had brought him here. 

Willing the fearful tremor in his own fingers to fade, Louis slowly closed his eyes and tried to think clearly. 

Rhosh had snatched him with the ease of a practiced predator, a trick of such speed and surprise that Louis hadn’t even the time to scream: there had simply been the sudden pressure of a heavy palm on the back of his neck. Then, limp half-consciousness, the snowy air biting into his exposed skin, trying to get closer to warmth and in the haze the beat, beat, beat of a heart- a low and powerful purr- engine of a far sturdier furnace than Lestat’s dynamite self had ever been. There had come that brief, elucidating panic when Louis had realized that the man in whose arms he lay was _not_ Lestat (nevermind his habitual belief that it was)- and then as quickly as he had been afraid, it no longer seemed to matter. The dead-weight of his body had been replaced by the thrill of weighing nothing at all. 

Louis strained to recollect. He remembered a befuddled urgency- opening his eyes against the stinging wind and seeing a dollhouse-miniature of the Chateau receding farther and farther away in the Winter night- nestled in the snowy mountains all aglow, like a Christmas trainset or an illustration in a children’s book of chivalric romances retold without the dark parts: just too fantastic to have ever been true. It was as if he had woken from some dream of being carried up, up, up, a doll in the hand of some little-girl God, into a much-realer nightmare. It seemed as if Louis could think nothing else, staring at the inside of the dark curtains, besides _This is a nightmare._ _I am in a nightmare._

But he was thinking it with such a sudden distant objectivity. Louis’ old familiar friend _detachment,_ which made everything seem realer than real, came creeping around and brought with it a strange sense of something almost like relief. He felt _awake_ \- the _actuality_ was acute- and in the face of that actuality, the nightly excitement and strange company of the Chateau seemed like the dream. Louis had spent so many lifetimes foraying in living nightmares that when the horror of the situation washed over him in full, it finally just felt like a homecoming. 

And wherever Louis had been taken, he didn’t think it was where Rhosh had taken Gabrielle: Gabrielle who, of course, was dead. It occurred to Louis that he hadn’t anticipated _not_ being dead, if ‘anticipation’ was an emotion that could be felt about an abduction; so technically the situation was already better than projected. But an instinct for the intricacies of terror churned in him. In the back of his brain, some voice whispered- with a sureness beyond anxiety- that _the worst was yet to come_. 

Louis tried to focus. The dark, drawn curtains around the bed had gone from comforting to claustrophobic, solid enough to suffocate: allowing in just enough chill to tell Louis that outside the confines of his unusually-comfortable captivity, there was cold. 

Regret at having to face the night came over him with a heavier weight than usual. He slowly pushed the bedding- white sheets, brick-colored comforter- away. Was it that same night, still, he wondered- or was it now the next? Or was it simply night, still, but in a different part of the world? How much time had passed? How- without knowing where he was- was Louis to even guess?

His head was heavy with an unusual sort of disorientation that made even blood-drinker sight swim in the dark. If he focused too hard, that unpleasant vertigo came over him. Louis was known as a late riser and _usually_ required some time to re-orient himself after waking- but he felt sure that something had been done to incapacitate him, and seemed to recall a single whispered word- perhaps it simply had been _sleep_ \- whose effects appeared to be working on his recalcitrant body still. It was said that the very old ones, like Gregory and Teshkamen and certainly Rhoshamandes, could send you to sleep with a word. Louis had been saved from fearing this by a touch of leftover cynicism, a partial disbelief: now he believed and feared in tandem. 

He waited for the worst of the weight in his skull to subside, then carefully slid his legs over the side of the bed.

He felt a plushness beneath his soles, good to stand on top of. Louis glanced down and saw his bare feet white against the faded jewel-tones of overlapping Persian rugs, a patchwork layered strategically across the stone floor so that not a single sliver of cold broke through. Abruptly Louis realized he wasn’t wearing shoes, or even socks; and a gut feeling unnerved him, terror pushing suddenly upon the floodgates of his brain as he rapidly understood himself to be wearing almost none of his own clothes at all. His dark jeans, sweater, and jacket were all missing, leaving him barelegged in his overlong white shirt. An eggshell-colored robe of silk damask floated around his body, having been laid over his shoulders and tied loosely about his waist. 

Uneasiness had shifted to the pitch of panic. Louis sat on the edge of the bed, feet planted firmly on the floor, and exerted all the effort he could muster to hear the sound of his own shaky breath in his ears and beyond it, to focus on something past fear.

Somewhere in the room, a fire burned softly; and when he listened he could hear the creaking of old, rotted wood, the soft groans of ancient stone, as if this place breathed too. He clung desperately to detachment, knowing that to think about the implications of his position would lead directly to the edge of a chasm in his brain which he was currently performing every possible mental maneuver to avoid looking into. For now, all he could do was avoid processing the minutiae for as long as possible. 

With nothing but a dying fire to beat back the nasty chill he had begun to grow cold. Now that he (didn’t) think about it, he’d probably lost the shoes en route, as often happened when one was flying and was probably especially common in situations where one had forgone wearing the proper boots for flying because they had been kidnapped. (It occurred to Louis that this was actually such a difficult situation to not panic in that he was really doing spectacularly well so far). If he focused on the tasks at hand very intently it almost allowed him to forget the context. What other option presented itself besides the deduction of where, exactly, he had been taken? It was a given guess that he was on one of Rhoshamandes’ many properties. But which one? It wasn’t like he _knew_ Rhosh very well (or at all). Louis closed his eyes again and listened beyond the walls; faintly, he heard a steady washing hugeness. Rhosh’s castle-by-the-sea, then, Saint Rayne, his home off the Irish coast which had been empty when Sevraine had searched it just the night before; but perhaps not empty enough. 

For there was another, much closer sound playing an in-and-out melody with the waves: somewhere very near, the second act of Mozart’s _Apollo et Hyacinthus_ wailed towards its warbling conclusion. 

The ugly chill had crept under every inch of Louis’ skin like water bloating a corpse. He could smell the sea, feel the stickiness of the humid air; could hear, distantly, the briny ocean creeping through the foundations of the castle as Hyacinth breathed his dying words and the final act of the opera began to unfold. The soprano’s voice, in staticy recording, echoed through the halls of Saint Rayne with all the high-pitched misery of a suicide’s ghost. 

Louis opened his eyes. His chest was caught in a vice. His vision swam, then cleared again; he sat still on one edge of the bed, whiteknuckle-gripping a handful of silk damask in one fist, staring at the wall opposite. Though a set of tall, vertical tapestries appeared to be hung around the room for insulation, the one directly across from him was crumpled on the floor as it had been ripped down in haste; and the curved walls, unlike the ones he had so recently come to enjoy in the Chateau, were unplastered stone that visibly wore its age. Where Louis would have usually found aesthetic pleasure in the rough-hewn rock, he now felt only an increasing anxiety. Even with his preternatural vision he struggled to make out of the faded embroidery in the low, flickering light. 

Slowly, Louis rose from the side of the bed. He was in a spacious circular room of which the four-poster was the centerpiece; glancing up, he saw that its wooden posts towered into a nest of rotted silk and velvet, red crown of the canopy rising up beyond filials and tester and into the darkness. The dim illumination stemmed from a great stone hearth opposite the bottom-end of the bed in which a fire suffocated slowly, its feeble light orchestrating the wretched twist of every living shadow. 

There were no electric lights, it seemed- a disused chandelier hung in the dim, crusted in years’ of worth of candlewax- and no _heat_. The chill of old stones crept up Louis’ bare legs, pricking gooseflesh with its subtle breath. 

He bit back terror, inhaled, and approached the sputtering hearth. Strange, limp shapes dangled from a series of iron nails driven into the wooden mantle, and as he grew closer Louis realized with a combined jolt of relief and dread that they were the draped forms of his clothes, left to dry and grow warm before the dying blaze. 

An upholstered loveseat of worn leather had been thrown to one side of the hearth, vomiting stuffing from a slit in its rust-colored seat. Louis slowly stepped over it, feeling every inhale, every second, as he drew close to those things which had been taken from him and purposefully placed here. 

The jacket was still wet, its velvet piles ruined, lining soaked and stained; the cashmere sweater was heavy with water and smelled already of mildew. His jeans and socks were barely drier. Forced with the choice of wearing wet clothes or barely any at all, Louis compromised: he pulled the pants down from their hook and, grimacing at the feeling of damp denim on his skin, pulled them on under the white robe. The vulnerability of bare legs was simply not an option. Compulsively, he tucked his shirttails in. 

Somehow, the draped silk of the robe felt confining. Its heavy sleeves fell too-long over his hands, fumbling his gestures, and when he moved his feet wanted to tangle in the long lace trim that dragged veil-like on the floor. It was a beautiful, uncomfortable gown, whose ostensible comfort was actually a prison; and briefly Louis was possessed by the violent urge to cast the robe off, ball it up, and throw it in the fire. But when he slipped its sleeve off his shoulder, he realized how terribly cold the room was, and how much colder still it had become wearing wet clothes. He felt his arms stiffen with the chill, and was compelled instead to draw the robe more totally about himself. 

Less comfortable but more dressed, and at a better vantage point from which to survey his surroundings, Louis peered into the darkness of the room and saw that the bed was the most intact part of it. It seemed a storm had come through here: all the furniture, rosewood and red leather, had been cast aside or destroyed. Four of nine sequential tapestries which had hung around the curved walls had been torn from their bearings, breaking their continuity- a story with so many gaps one could hardly tell what the narrative had ever been; but it was obvious that some tale of violence had happened _here_. The loveseat to the left of Louis looked as if an animal had clawed it open, and a small writing desk in the far corner of the room had been cracked into collapsing halves. A pile of splintered wood by its lilting base suggested what might have once been a chair. On the opposite side of the bed, a night-table had been pulled into its individual component parts, drawers ripped from their sockets, contents discarded across the carpets. Louis saw, on the far wall, a walk-in closet whose door hung from its hinge like a busted jaw; fine shirts and jackets had been strewn across the floor, stray buttons against faded carpet white as broken teeth.

This place was too lived-in to be any kind of dungeon. Louis didn’t doubt that Rhosh _had_ dungeons to put him in, buried deep in the soaked foundations of this beautiful ruin, dripping wet and perfectly unpleasant. So why leave him here, untethered in the lap of forlorn luxury? _Why here at all?_ He’d been stripped of his wet clothes, and the blanket that he had so wanted to curl up under had been laid over his prone form while he slept. Louis kept thinking that if he passed around the room and grounded himself his head might clear and provide him with lucid answers. But terror gnawed in the back of his mind. He couldn’t imagine what Rhoshamandes could want from the Court now, short of a resurrection- or revenge.

He found himself standing before the ruined closet, staring dully at the scattered shirts. He recognized the black wool coat with the fur collar that Rhosh had worn to Trinity Gate two years ago dumped on the floor with vicious indifference. A robe of burgundy silk dangled from a hook inside the broken door; beneath it a second bone-white gown had fallen in a heap atop the purple rug. Louis peered at the crumpled eggshell lace, glowing white as an angel’s raiment in the dark.

He took a step back and felt something sharp crunch under his bare heel. It was a tiny bead of amber, displaced from the shade of a shattered lamp. The floor to the left of the bed was a chaos of papers and small objects, pens and books. Only two items remained on the stand’s scratched rosewood top: a paperback _Anna Karenina_ , and a small picture frame which had been neatly and deliberately placed face-down. Louis did not feel the need to turn the frame over; but for the second time that night, wicked curiosity betrayed him. He reached out a thin hand and set the frame right-side-up. Benedict's boyish face, a smiling candid on the stone steps of some great temple, laughed at him from behind a patina of broken glass. 

Louis looked askance, wanting to think of anything else.

He paid futile attention to the tapestry over the nightstand, the last in the set that had once circled around the room. In contrast to the red-based decor, the hangings were woven in the keys of green and blue with gold thread used throughout, adding a certain magic to the image. Age had faded them, their intricate weave grown fuzzy from the salty air. The series depicted an idealized narrative of a noble hunt. This finely-embroidered scene was the final chapter in the story: a wash of green foliage surrounding the luminous image of a unicorn trapped in a glittering golden cage. 

He turned away. These _arras_ were older than this High Gothic-imitation castle, and he wondered if they had been brought over from the medieval forests of France; woven sometime in those early years after Rhoshamandes had found Benedict amongst the trees, a mystic wandered too far from the monastery, and claimed his as his own.

Of course in that time Rhosh had lived with a whole harem of fledglings and Benedict was merely the favorite. At least, that was how Everard bitterly recounted it. Eleni and Allessandra had spoken positively of family, a stable peace which the Children of Satan had broken up forever; but after the events of the previous year, even their rosiness regarding Rhoshamandes had grown quiet. Louis wondered which came first: isolation or the isolationist, sorrow or spite.

He glanced about. He peered into the depths of the closet, saw the dry-cleaning bags ripped open, boxes of shoes and fur hats spilled to the floor. He looked at the nightstand’s contents- personal effects spilled across the rug in the vague Rorschach outline of splayed limbs. Benedict’s eyes squinted in a grin from atop the dresser. Louis set the frame photo-down. There was a door to the far-right of the room and there was nothing else to see here, no better plan, nothing to do but try to open it. 

Or not open it. Louis approached the portal slowly. The stone arch into which the door was set had been carved, long ago, with a salt-worn pattern of ivy that crawled down the frame to the floor. Then Louis’ eyes followed the arch to its summit and realized the tendrils were not ivy, but snakes- the hair of a snarling Medusa who, crowning the doorframe, lent monstrous protection to this lair. 

He figured it was _probably_ locked- though Rhoshamandes was of the class of blood-drinker for whom not even solid stone was an impediment (and Louis himself could easily unlock a door with the Mind Gift). He laid his hand upon the quartz doorknob, which had been rubbed smooth in places by the habitual movement of a larger palm. Louis’ own slender fingers fit badly in the worn grooves as he rotated the knob experimentally.

It turned. There was the clear weight behind it of a heavy deadbolt- but it had been left open. A door suitable for keeping prisoners: but Louis wasn’t being _kept_ . He paused with his hand on the hunk of quartz, filled with trepidation, familiar with the sure signs of a trap. What if someone was on the other side? What if _Rhosh_ was on the other side? The thought paralyzed him mid-escape. He could still hear Hyacinth dying through the door, the boy soprano putting his all into the role, music emanating from just a few rooms away. 

The voice of fear, with whom Louis had lived intimately all his mortal and immortal life, whispered in the back of his brain that it might just be better to _not try_. Just not open the door. If Rhosh _was_ laying in wait for him, it would be better to not risk confrontation, to try and use his passivity as a bargaining chip, certainly far better than to anger a five-thousand-year-old madman by trying to _run_. 

Louis slowly removed his hand from the knob. Then he took a step back from the door.

He was not a powerful psychic. Within a community of blood-drinkers Louis had learned himself in fact, to be a _particularly weak_ psychic- the sort for whom basic mental tasks take conscious effort. Louis had spent a very long time _not practicing._ Even living at Trinity Gate, he had chosen not to experiment. He preferred not to exercise these monstrous strengths; he’d reasoned that if he couldn’t _escape_ that power within, he would simply try to forget it. The flame which burned inside him would be suppressed into nothingness. And so, in fear of accidentally stoking it, Louis had learned to live his life always with a firm hand on that inner self.

(For instance: Louis was always careful to never think _I can fly_. It made it too easy. He always thought _I would fly_ , or qualified it like: _I might be able to fly,_ even on one notable occasion _I_ **_must_ ** _fly_. But never _I can_ , never those magic words, _I could,_ which would, he knew, make it true. If he said to himself _I can fly_ it would become a reality- and in the guarded garden of his heart, it was this reality which he still longed to escape; this reality in which he was not a man but a monster, thirsty and living and free. So Louis did not ever say to himself _I can fly_. He feared so terribly the possibility of believing it.) 

Louis’ body, stunted by years of inertia, was an inattentive listener; after so long waiting for death, his flesh had become unused to the rhythm of living. Like a convalescent whose muscles have atrophied, he was only beginning to teach himself to walk again- step by step; to relearn note-by-note that strange song which was living. _Do this, do this, do this,_ he told his hands. _Rise from rest- stand- do not lay down and die._ And after years of suppressing them this was how Louis used his innate psychic powers: as one persuading the chest to take every single breath. 

And so Louis stood before the door and exerted himself beyond it, really listening. 

He couldn’t sense Rhosh _in particular_ right now, which probably meant he wasn’t lying in wait just on the other side of the door. As muddy and prone to interference as Louis’ outreaches were, a very old vampire in close proximity was something that one could generally _feel:_ even Eleni, Alessandra and Everard could sense his skulking outside of the Chateau. Truly aged blood-drinkers have a weight to their presence. Psychically speaking, being in a room with Rhoshamandes was not unlike a slow smothering- but Louis was easily imposed. Every venerable blood-drinker put him on edge; even Marius’ ancient roaming eyes made him nervous. 

Louis had not noticed he had closed his eyes. He opened them and for a moment the dim room swam. He slid his hand over the knob, stopping shy of opening it. There was simply no _good_ decision to be made. The _safest_ option was to opt out of choice and remain where he was; perhaps staying put would buy him time before the inevitable encounter. Or maybe the encounter didn’t _have_ to be inevitable. _Maybe_ , whispered that voice of fear, _you will be rewarded for doing nothing._ _Maybe someone will come._ Or at the very least maybe Rhosh wouldn’t. But surely he had been brought here for some purpose. Why was Louis not as dead as Gabrielle? Duly, he wished that Gabrielle were there with him. She, at least, would have been brave enough to choose the fight instead of the trap.

But another tiny voice in the back of his brain, far smaller and newer than the voice of fear, whispered that if he didn’t at least _try_ to escape, the only guarantee would be that he stayed right here. Louis turned the knob all the way, felt the bolt slide, and pushed the heavy oak door outward.

It took exertion to open. It was probably braced in iron. He wondered if Rhosh thought him weak enough to be imprisoned by the weight alone. Musty air poured into the already-stale room from beyond the crack. A single torch on the far wall emitted its weak glow, casting weird shadows across the carnage of what had once been a spacious office. Louis’ eyes swept over the dim ruin in a brief panic and found not a soul in sight. He took a step over the threshhold and felt the coarse fur of some animal under his bare feet. 

To his immediate right was a row of cabinets with shattered glass faces. Louis laid his hand on the frame beside him, which still held a remainder of its Old French statuettes- the rest had been scattered and broken across the rugs. For a moment he resisted the urge to pick them up, dust them off, see what could be saved; as if there were _anything_ here that could be saved, as if anything about this situation could be salvaged at all. 

What destruction had been suggested in the bedroom was explicit here. A set of looming bookcases dominated the left wall of the room, almost entirely empty: most of their collection seemed to have been disseminated across the floor. An enormous carved Oak desk took up the center of the space, its finely-etched patterns worn smooth by time. The desk had been entirely gutted, its chair smashed, drawers torn out, desktop swept clean but for a bulky computer lying on its side, blank face glinting eerily in the dark, disconnected wires dangling like viscera. 

The stone walls were draped in thick pelts for insulation, preserved perfectly in the spread-out shapes of the creatures they’d once been. Mounted on the uncovered rock between cabinets were small, square glass frames whose contents were obscured by the depth of shadow. When Louis drew closer he found that they contained meticulously articulated insects, each leg pinned perfectly, their Latin names handwritten on tiny labels with neat, bubbly penmanship.

It seemed as if every cabinet, drawer, shelf and book in the room had been pillaged, every paper in the office washed across the floor as if a wave had deposited them there. Louis thought of the emptied closet, the gone-through clothes, and bought his gaze around to rest again on the gutted desk. He had assumed that these things were fruits of some destruction Rhoshamandes had wreaked; but remembering Sevraine’s claim that she had gone through _every_ computer for lists of properties, he now suspected that at least some of this ruination had been their own. The place had been utterly sacked. Rhosh himself would have no need to so-thoroughly go through his own things, to uncover his own secrets. Louis felt strangely guilty, like he had been snooping through this life himself.

And what if he had? A flame of fury licked suddenly at his throat. Louis bit his tongue, knowing that anger would only bring the stowaway fear, and that he could not afford to be afraid. But he was angry with himself- angry that he was not angry. He had been brought here against his will, and he wished, suddenly, for righteous rage; wished to feel anything at all besides the strange, rueful impression that he was seeing some misery too personal and private to be seen. 

On the opposite wall the room’s singular torch glowed weakly, an ominous beacon beside an identical Gothic arch with an identical closed door. Propelled by inevitability, Louis began to pick his way through the unholy mess to the other side of the room. He moved carefully through the chaos of fountain pens and quills and sheaves of legal documents, old and new, that had come from an overturned file-cabinet. Dry flowers crunched under Louis’ feet as he skirted the perimeter of the great curved desk, avoiding a still-damp, mildewy stain on the carpet where a red vase had splintered into a thousand pieces. The daisies it had contained looked as if they had been dead for a very long time. 

Amongst the debris under his feet, the torchlight glinted off a glossy glamour shot: and it was like how sometimes when Benji would drive them down the New York I-95 there’d be a brutal accident, and Louis would be unable to tear his eyes away from the burning wreck. He found himself picking the headshot from a pile of photographs spilling from the mouth of a torn manila file. Benedict’s guileless smile flickered in the dark. 

The photo showed an eighteen-year-old-boy: dirty blonde hair a little mussed, oval eyes wide and bright; smiling in the manner of a blood-drinker who had long-ago learned to conceal his teeth. It struck Louis briefly how remarkably youthful Benedict seemed, how in these normal clothes, in this normal context, he simply looked like a first-year student. It was the kind of headshot one takes for the preparation of mortal documents- a false passport or identification. Immortality renders it impossible to date a picture using the age of its subject. But Louis duly recognized the dark-blue cashmere v-neck that Benedict wore as one he had seen, and did not want to think of how recently these travel plans must have been made. 

He looked down at the floor, and his cold blood ran a little colder. He was standing in the center of a spill of dozens of outtakes pouring from a torn file. Benedict’s childish face stared up at him from all around in slight variations of pose. In that one he had laughed, in another there was a blur of movement; Louis moved his foot back and saw, from the left edge of the picture beneath his heel, an out-of-shot hand sitting heavily on Benedict’s shoulder. Rhosh, he was forced to imagine, who had at least five inches on his recently-deceased fledgling- standing just outside the frame, a shadow barely out-of-view. 

Louis let the photo he had been holding float to the floor. The chill had crept again into his veins and filled them with something sluggish.

Without thinking he had moved away. He found himself standing at the far end of the room, before the beaconous torch whose light cast so grotesquely across the office. Louis felt sure it had been left there for him, and was scared of the _why._ This door, too, was unlocked- but far heavier than the last, forcing Louis to lean the pressure of his shoulder into the wood until it creaked open slowly. The room beyond was just as dark, just as vast. He took the sputtering torch from its sconce knowing it would be comforting to have a fist full of fire. 

The carpet under his feet was suddenly much newer and much more plush. The uneven illumination of the flame cast a flickering circle of light across a beautiful and ravaged parlor. Abruptly the sound of the recorded opera had become much louder. 

The space between this door and the next was a long rectangular parlor in which Louis had emerged to the right. Tapestries and frames had been torn from the walls, and a cabinet on the far wall had been brutally gutted of its fine china; deadly shards of varicolored glass and porcelain twinkled across the carpet like scattered jewels. Immediately to his left was a great, cold hearth, around which two overstuffed armchairs and a messy table were crowded. A harpsichord lurked in the shadowy corner to his right, its hollow, upended seat spewing sheet music in a wide arc across the rug. Peering into the darkness at the far left side of the long room, he made out the vague shape of a writing desk- its outline strangely deformed by some large soft lump atop it, from which emanated a sickeningly organic smell. 

Dead across from Louis was another dark arch, leading into the next room from which a dim, cold light flickered mysteriously. Louis took a step into the room and pivoted towards the hearth, and suddenly his stomach filled with stones.

Above the mantle, an enormous oil portrait watched over the parlor with a stern and disturbing sentinelity. At a glance it had been drafted poorly: the canvas, much too large for its two figures, was mostly a black mass of negative space. Louis wondered briefly if the picture had been left unfinished- if perhaps its mortal artist had died early; but as he drew closer, he realized that it was not merely a portrait of Rhoshamandes and Benedict at all. Pulled along by the thread of fascination, Louis stepped around the cluttered coffee-table and came to eye-level with the mantle. Illuminated by the warm light, he could see that the dark paint of the backdrop bore thick strokes of gradual addition; this close, he could even faintly smell the passage of years between each layer of oil. As he passed the flickering torch slowly over the portrait, indistinct details surfaced unevenly from beneath the layers, as if Louis were peering at the grave of a shipwreck through a vast darkness of water.

Squinting, he counted the ghostly outlines of five figures who had been painted out. There, concealed, was the silver mass of Allessandra’s hair- there a crinkle which could be Notker’s wry smile, there the bright snare of Eleni’s eyes. He only had to pay attention, and abruptly, a whole menagerie revealed themselves. To the left of Rhoshamandes was a greyish suggestion of Everard’s nervous, spindly hands, and in the back, long-obscured, Louis made out the phantom image of a face he had only seen as part of a nightmare- in hints which had then been incomprehensible- through the deluge of Lestat’s blood. 

All that had been left untouched by the gradual painting-over were the luminous figures of Rhosh, sternly staring from the center of the canvas, and Benedict at his lower-right side. The clothes they wore dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, Louis guessed, and whatever Medieval artist had originally painted this unfortunate family portrait had captured their likenesses unnervingly well. There was a snare of light in Benedict’s golden hair, a living brightness in his green eyes which set Louis’ teeth on edge. He had seen the real boy too-recently; and he suddenly felt overcome by the distinct awareness that all that remained of that real boy now was this uncanny replica.

The oil had been retouched within the last year. He could even see the tiny creases in Rhoshamandes’ fingers, laid lightly around the back of Benedict’s neck. 

Louis looked into Rhoshamandes’ painted eyes and beheld their blood-lineage. This was where they had come from: Lestat, and himself as well. He could not keep his gaze from wandering into the darkness of the backdrop, staring into the void, looking and not-looking for those indistinct details; seeing the hint of Magnus and not wanting to see. Yet he could not look away. It was too much like staring context in the face, like discovering the secret names of mad ancestors and beginning finally to understand oneself.

Louis locked his green eyes to Benedict’s, equally green, and stared into the austere expression of that boyish face. He did not want to think the unbidden thought: that this was the beauty which Magnus had loved enough to try to steal for himself, and perhaps it was this boyish beauty which had echoed through their blood, distorted by madness, to centuries later doom Lestat. 

Louis startled himself as he knocked his leg against the low oak coffee table and caused a loud clatter of metal-on-stone. A shuffle of papers slid loudly to the floor. When he stepped back from the hearth, it seemed, by a trick of shadows, that Benedict’s painted gaze followed him. 

He looked down and saw that the fallen object was only a rusted poker, which he had kicked to the base of the brick. Spread out across the lived-in clutter of the coffee table had been a stack of travel documents, now spilled; the shiny red covers of two brand-new French passports glinted in the dark. Atop a stack of fine-art catalogues lay a long, unfolded piece of parchment, very old and faded beyond legibility, which appeared to be a map. Judging by the still-soft wax of the table’s lone bronze candlestick, it had been read recently.

Louis bent down and picked up a thin volume which had, dislodged from the mess of the table, fallen at his foot. It was a recent translation of _The Bakkhai._ Hung open to a page in which the text had been notated in pink pen by that same neat hand which had made the Latin labels in the office, Louis’ eye caught the underlined passage-

_[AGAVE: Who killed him? How did he come to my hands?_

_KADMOS: Truth is an unbearable thing. And its timing is bad.]_

-and he placed the little book down atop the crumbling map, moving away with the distinct cemetery feeling that he had disturbed something belonging to the dead. 

The organic smell which permeated the entire parlor had become- as Louis moved across the room- even stronger and more overwhelming; had become the distinct scent of plant-matter left to rot. Pulled by the thread of compulsive curiosity- thinking _it is not me, it is the thread, I am being pulled_ \- Louis began to pick his way, barefoot and careful, through the broken china towards the dark end of the parlor. 

A piece of charcoal snapped under his step as he approached the desk. This, too, had its contents disseminated across the surrounding floorspace: Louis saw pencils and pens, colored chalk, broken pots of paint and tiny brushes. A large sketchpad had been torn to pieces, scraps bright against the floor, and all that remained attached to the skeleton of its binding were a few pages atop which was visible an unfinished sketch. Louis squinted at in the dim until the loose lines of shoulders, a neck, a face whose turned-away expression seemed focused on some uncaptured work, assembled themselves into what he belatedly realized to be a quick bust of Rhoshamandes.

He did not see he was standing over the desktop until its organic smell had become sickeningly sweet. Louis’ shaking right hand plunged into the soft, mildewy shape atop it, a great mass of wet petals and tiny thorns.

As if they had been laid neatly over a tomb, hundreds of red roses and blood-bright Provence carnations were piled atop the desk. Petals drifted to the floor and gave the mess an altarlike quality. The flowers, not-quite fresh, had begun to molder; their blackened ends had begun to curl and the damp had taken its hold in their softness, bringing about a snowy dusting of white mold. Strange beauty and a sick sad feeling. Louis was not sure he wanted to know what kind of love he was looking at.

The eyes of the portrait bore into his back. The overwhelming perfume of hundreds of flowers dizzied Louis a little. The opera had moved solidly into its third act, and Louis was close enough to its source that he could hear the glipping static of a dusty needle over the mournful wail of the boy soprano.

The music could not be coming from the next room; but neither was it further than a room away. At a loss he glanced around the parlor and saw no other exit besides that from which he had just come. The urge to retrace his steps and return to the captive comfort of the bedroom passed over Louis powerfully. This train-car apartment was laid out so that there was nowhere else to go but _on_. Dread had made a solid nest in his stomach. The pitch of the opera was like a scream he could not release. Even to Louis, who missed the floral heat of Louisiana like a physical ache, the heady scent of the flowers had grown nauseating; like everything else in this place, it seemed just on the verge of rotten. 

He had drawn close enough to the open doorway that he could now feel, somewhere, the distinct living presence of Rhoshamandes- as one who goes deep enough into the lair to smell the dragon’s breath. He peered around the arch and saw that the room beyond was a smaller, less formalized sitting affair; that it was empty; and that the source of the only electric illumination he had so far encountered was a large flatscreen television playing a black-and-white film on mute. 

As Louis stepped into the sitting room a shiver passed over him which was like the certain knowledge that he was making the wrong choice. But there was no _right_ choice to be made. 

The opera rose drastically as he passed through the portal. Rhoshamandes’ presence at the far end of the apartment was like smoke weighing down the air. Across the room was another arched entryway, smaller than the one Louis had just come through- and it was from behind this portal that the music emanated. Louis realized in the tensing of his shoulders that this time the iron-braced door was hanging _open_. 

The room that lay between, on whose threshold he stood frozen, was a more comfortable affair than the ones he had already passed through. The centerpiece of the space was an enormous, curving leather couch which could comfortably fit six or seven men; before it was another small coffee table covered in scattered objects, and these things were both clustered around a large wooden entertainment cabinet from which the television projected silently. Louis recognized the picture immediately without even needing to pay attention to the French subtitles: it was the last ten minutes of _Eyes Without a Face_. 

He’d seen the film a number of times. He had first watched it at a matinee in San Francisco, and a few years ago Armand had brought home a restored edition to add to Trinity gate’s enormous collection of films. (Sybelle, particularly, had loved this one.) Louis spied the reason for the picture’s silence to the right of the flatscreen: a toppled surround-sound speaker had been ripped from the wall and thrown down to the floor. 

For indeed the sitting room- if not as completely destroyed- _was_ worse-for-wear. Though most of the significant furniture appeared still upright (a marked improvement), the space’s primary feature besides the entertainment system was a long, horizontal set of grated cabinets which stood knee-height along the four walls, and which had once held a collection of hundreds of Blu-Ray films of all ages and genres- every single one of which now appeared to have been scattered across the floor. The soft pink carpeting of the room was covered in a spray of plastic cases which had been swept off the open shelves. Louis took his right foot off a loose disc and saw that it was _Rebecca._ He read other titles from the floor- _Orphee, Bride of Frankenstein, Heavenly Creatures, Jean de Florette._ Without knowing entirely why, Louis picked up the case for _Jean_. On the back of the case was a post-it whose cryptic memo- _12/8/07_ \- was written in the same rounded hand in which _The Bakkhai_ had been notated. 

Benedict’s films, then, Benedict’s choices- _Benedict’s_ sitting room. Louis glanced around the space again, contextualizing the sense of comfort which pervaded nowhere else in the apartment. A vague memory surfaced of something Lestat had said when Benedict had initially come to stay at the Chateau, and Lestat had first begun to draw a narrative out of the boyish blood-drinker: _I wouldn’t call him innocent, Louis. But he hardly even knows where Rhosh goes most of the time._

So this was his life; so this was their life together. 

Louis now had a vague idea of where he was. Benedict had told Lestat casually of this place, a beautiful bunker deep within Saint Rayne; a windowless and well-furnished apartment in which he lived a great deal of life under Rhoshamandes’ aegis. Though of course their quarters proper were aboveground, this nest had been built for intimacy- for privacy and protection- and therefore converted perfectly, for Louis, to a prison. 

The nature of his surroundings contextualized, Louis felt a strange empathy: he thought of the portrait and the sketch and the moldering roses in the parlor, the hours they must have spent together in this honeymoon tomb. On the little coffee table lay the empty case of the film which was currently playing, and on the front of this case was a near-identical sticky-note. Benedict had written in pink pen a very recent date- _11/17/17_ \- and one word beneath: _UNFINISHED_. 

Louis slowly looked up at the silent TV screen and watched, with a terrible understanding beyond the possibility of articulation, the last scene of _Eyes Without a Face_.

The walls of the sitting room were lined with small, square frames: flowers pressed behind glass. Benedict had given them all neatly-penned names on tiny labels. Louis felt sure that, like the articulated insects in Rhoshamandes’ office, he had performed their preservation himself; and he wondered uselessly and strangely if Benedict had also done the taxidermies, thought of the intimate, offhand sketch of a distracted Rhosh he’d seen in the parlor. Benedict had been an illuminator of manuscripts and it seemed in immortality he had retained an artistic compulsion. What kind of work did he do at that desk? Did he play the harpsichord in the parlor? Louis could almost imagine, unbidden, its tinkling keys- a little song tapped out to the tone of melancholy.

He was struck abruptly by an unrelated sensory memory. Louis shook his head suddenly to clear it of the sound of wings beating against frantically against bars, the screams of the cockatiels they’d kept in the Rue Royale as they burned to death in the beautiful confines of their gilded cage. 

Louis opened his eyes. This apartment was a trap built for two. And now Louis was here, and he and Rhoshamandes were two, and the trap had been laid for him. 

Rhosh waited on the other side of that door. He knew that Louis had come this far. Why _had_ Louis come this far? Why had he not fled, returned to the relative safety of the sumptuous bedroom? Every survival instinct left in Louis’ wasted eternal body screamed for him to fly back to that red-velvet bed where, at least, he might find temporary safety in confinement.

But in the back of Louis’ mind came the timid voice of his understanding: _The cage is no less safe._ This was why Louis had brought himself here, why he had deposited himself right outside this door- the only other option was to _wait_ for the conditions of his destruction. _Rhoshamandes_ , said that tiny, needling, knowing horror, _will do what he wishes either way; the only choice is whether to choose pain or to have it thrust upon you._

Louis, as someone who knew well that suffering was inevitable, had always preferred at least to be able to select the suffering of his choice. 

The door hung open. Louis felt himself walking towards it, across the catastrophized room, as if in a spell. It hadn’t previously occurred but it _was_ technically possible that he was under a spell- he had no doubt of the power of Rhosh’s Mind Gift. It would be so relieving, he indulged, to figure out that he was bewitched, such a relief to be absolved of the choices he was making right now. Louis had been under the influences of both hypnotism and good old-fashioned sympathetic magic before. Unfortunately, he had found an odd sort of pleasure in both. The actions one was compelled to do didn’t matter; it was the sensation of _being_ bewitched, of submitting to the power of another, that he had enjoyed. The freedom from will had been intoxicating. 

And it would certainly explain his fatal desire to _do_ something, anything, in a situation of what he knew to be complete helplessness. It would explain his foolishness, hoping for a chance of escape: Louis was not usually so stupid as to hope. Most importantly it would excuse what he knew to be the wicked, self-annihilating curiosity that had brought him this far. Louis did not want to look into himself and see the face of it, that fascination, which always brought him to the foot of the monster before it even had to seek him out. Better to be a slave to some invisible master in evil, better to belong to another absolutely than to confront the evil in himself. 

But Louis knew all the old wisdom, had been sufficiently cautioned, had heard all the old tales, had _been warned_. The talk said that an ancient vampire could not work his powers on you without seeing your eyes- he could only hypnotize you with a glance. (This had permanently crushed many of Louis’ fledgling theories about Lestat). Nor could he work his will on a party that truly resisted, so he would _make you want it_. The worst wolves, Louis had been cautioned, all look like men.

He had come to the door. The room beyond the hung-open maw was dark and warm. His hand lingered on the edge of the frame and he did not know why: what could he possibly do at this point? The fateful encounter was sealed, it was occurring, it was _now_. Rhoshamandes already knew he was there. 

There came, from within the darkness, a great heavy sigh. 

“What are you waiting for?” Chesty baritone with the rumble of millennia. Louis was frozen. “Do come in.”


	2. -for just a bit too long to convey the message--

**II**. Wordlessly Louis pushed the door open and stepped into the darkened library to meet his fate. 

A firelit warmth washed over him at once in the small, circular space, whose descending blanket of darkness was beaten back only by the blaze of a roaring hearth. In the dim illumination Louis saw walls lined with towering bookshelves that stretched up into the dark. As if someone had torn through these shelves in haste, loose papers and broken bindings spilled down into piles at their feet; ancient volumes littered the carpet carelessly like so many fallen apples. As he slid the dying torch into a sconce beside the doorframe, Louis resisted the temptation to pick up a crumbling tome which nudged against his toe. 

Immediately to the right of the door was a fine writing desk, stacked high with still-open notebooks all marked in that now-recognizable, bubbling hand. _Benedict’s library._ And before the hearth sat three plush chairs in a tight enclave, centered around a small standing table; on the table was an open bottle of wine, a half-drunk glass; and in the chair whose high back faced Louis slumped the broad-shouldered form of Rhoshamandes. 

He had not turned to greet Louis. He stared steadily into the hearth. In the backlit gloom, all Louis saw was a large hand gripping the arm of the seat, a deeply hunched shoulder, a curtain of long blonde hair that caught all the flickering firelight in the room and fractalized it into a shatter of gold. 

And in the chair to the immediate left of Rhosh was an elegant tumble of knit clothes and cold white flesh which Louis understood immediately to be a corpse. It had been an old man, his eyes now closed, hands curled limp and polite in his lap: now it was a corpse. The room smelled- not of _blood_ , exactly, but of the subtler warmth of very recent human death; of a well-fed vampire who had spilled not a drop. Not a strong scent at all- merely the whiff of burnt wick which lingers, momentarily, after snuffing a candle.

Louis stood frozen on the threshold. The great Rhoshamandes casually turned, in his creaking ancient seat, to lay his gaze upon that being whom he thought of as the Consort of the Prince. His blue eyes, alighting upon Louis, flashed like chips of ice in the firelight.

His skin- perhaps owing to his company- was unusually ruddy for an ancient; and he was unshaven. Rhosh, Louis realized, must trim his own hair every morning: his clean modern-man’s cut had flowed overnight into a long yellow mane that fell to his shoulders in waves, and a mid-length cornstalk beard had overgrown the sharp square of his jaw, carving his cheekbones hollower in the low light. 

Louis was overwarm, dizzy suddenly with a fear of _the absolute:_ that this was _happening_ , that he was _right there_. Rhosh was simply looking at him, studying Louis with quiet interest, and it seemed somehow that the languid appreciation of his gaze was more terrifying than any thorough inspection. 

“Louis,” he said. His low, calm voice had that too-resonant quality of great age, as if the name in his mouth were a pebble worn smooth by his tongue. “Do sit. Your new lucidity leaves us time to discuss. I am glad you’ve come so willingly.” 

The sudden intimacy of the address crawled up Louis’ spine; he did not like the subtle curve of a smile in Rhosh’s tone. He spoke with that fluid not-accent which all ancient vampires eventually acquire, from everywhere and nowhere at once. 

“I was beginning to think,” Rhoshamandes rumbled, “that I would have to wake you myself.”

Louis didn’t budge from the doorframe. The stubbornness of terror can have a way of sometimes looking like courage: but really, it simply seemed like there was no point in hiding his reactions from a man who could tear through his mind and scramble the contents for fun. Rhosh, regardless, would _know_ Louis was afraid- was there even any point ( _whispered the voice of fear_ ) in being brave? 

Louis realized suddenly that at some point the opera had stopped. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the quiet sounds of flame devouring wood. Somewhere in the room he could hear the soft static of a record turning silently on a player with no needle to its surface; aimless movement without music, just spinning and spinning. The hearth roared and Rhosh watched him with the content patience of a man who knows the other has no choice but to play along. 

Louis opened his mouth, which felt, all of a sudden, very dry. Silly mortal reaction.

“Perhaps,” he finally managed, voice so low and soft it would be inaudible to any mortal, “this is someone’s will. I would hesitate to call it mine.”

Rhoshamandes’ laughter rumbled through Louis’ chest before it became audible. 

“I quite believe you have a will of your own,” he chuckled, “though that remains to be proven. Please.” The flames snared in his eyes and lent them a heat which he turned on Louis effortlessly. “Sit.”

Slowly, the heavy wooden door behind Louis creaked to a close. He turned in time to see it fit comfortably into its frame, a heavy _clunk_ telling him that Rhosh's mind had slid the deadbolt into place with the ease of habit. 

Louis’ legs obeyed before his brain processed, carrying him slowly to the third, empty chair at Rhosh’s right, white damask robe swishing around his ankles; and as he sat he was suddenly very aware of the thinness of his white button shirt. He sank into the seat, its red-velvet cushion worn soft with age, and drew the robe closer around himself. 

The tall wooden backs of the chairs enclosed them tightly; they were gathered around the little table like a ritual circle. Already overheated with fear, their proximity to the hearth was overbearing. To sit so close to a roaring fire would discomfort any other young blood-drinker- but Louis had, in his immortal life, enough intimacy with uncontrollable blazes so as to make the space at Rhoshamandes’ side almost pleasant. To stare so directly into the face of death almost felt like home. 

When Louis looked up he was sitting across from the corpse. The old man’s dead eyes stared blankly from behind his closed lids, rendered translucent by the flickering light.

Mortal empathy and compulsive vampiric revulsion went to war within him: Louis was overcome with a tender desire to touch the man’s waxy hands, to arrange them neater in his lap, to brush the thin silky hair out of his withered face, and simultaneously the urge to _recoil_ \- to get as far away as possible from this _thing_ that had once been alive and human and perhaps kind. Blood-drinkers have a proper animal repulsion to rot: it is that instinct which says _do not lay down beside your kill to die._ But the body of every vampire contains the blueprint of a long-dead mortal who, by his foolish human heart, is compelled eternally towards the human intimacy with death. 

And to not look at the corpse, Louis had to look at the man beside him, slouched in the center chair facing the hearth. Rhoshamandes seemed like his thoughts were elsewhere. He stared into the flames from beneath his heavy blonde brow, some deep, unreadable intent in his cold eyes. 

This gave Louis’ terror-gripped mind a moment to process him. He had only ever met Rhosh in a technical sense, having long-ago learned to keep his mouth closed when a blood-drinker who could kill him with a look was making pronouncements; but this was not the same Rhoshamandes who had come two years ago to Trinity Gate to bargain. 

It had not gone well for that Rhosh, then, who Louis had taken stock of at the time: close-crop of his blonde hair, sharp cut of a clean face, and the cavalier self-possession with which he held himself. Rhoshamandes had worn authority with that easy, graceful physicality always brought into eternity by men whose strength is not just a gift of the Dark Blood; that silent language of demands which is spoken by those so powerful that the world has no choice but to accommodate them. Louis couldn’t deny that there had been satisfaction in watching how quickly that entitlement had devolved, in the face of Lestat’s chaos, into hysteria. 

But this person who had kidnapped him to Saint Rayne was a different man. Louis studied the spectacle of his grown-out hair, silken beard a shimmering riot, and tried desperately to make an objective approximation. He wanted to focus the animal terror that animated his body into attention to detail- to see Rhosh in parts. The firm, saturnine set of his sensuous mouth, marble-carving of the cheekbones, the contours of him in profile- tight set of his jaw, nose a straight Greek line flowing into the strength of his brow. Everything as hard and sure as if it had all been blasted for eternity into stone. Those ancient eyes, which seemed tired, worn, were the only feature that wore his age: Rhosh had died at twenty-four. Only his preoccupied gaze, filled with the shadowplay of flame, was five-thousand. 

Louis’ eyes followed the line of his jaw down the thick cords of his neck, over the sweep of his broad shoulders and down the line of his undone shirtcollar, buttons popped, hint of blonde glinting at the top of his breast. He was wearing near-modern clothes, but they were rumpled in a way that Louis registered as unusual for a man known to be fastidious. He could tell from the wrinkling of Rhosh’s off-white shirt and the silk burgundy smoking jacket draped over it that they had been worn for a few nights.

Louis saw the thickness of his forearm beneath his rolled-up sleeves; the hair which seemed, in the flickering illumination, a fine dust of gold. Around his solid wrist he wore a white-gold Rolex with a shattered face, _tick-tick-tick_ of its hands stilled forever at the moment of fracture.

He found himself insensibly wondering why it was that some men grew such masculine features at a much younger age. Surely in this case it was because Rhoshamandes had grown to manhood in a time when ‘old age’ was thirty-five; or perhaps because the time had required he learn fortitude very young. Louis remembered hearing Benedict repeat his knowledge of Rhosh’s mortal history- ‘a man at twelve’- and found himself, this time, believing it. Louis, a year older at death than Rhosh had ever lived to be in life, had retained even into adulthood a delicacy of bone structure that had marked him out from other men. (Well, _something_ had). Even Lestat’s broad-shouldered, athletic hunter’s build was smooth still with twenty-year-old boyishness.

Rhosh had not moved to look at him, but Louis realized that for some time a smile had been creeping its way across his stony face.

When he spoke, too, his voice was five-thousand, preternatural rumble resounding unmistakably under the cool baritone. The hair on the back of Louis’ neck stood on-end like it was all those years ago and he was still mortal, that kind of vulnerability. 

“We could sit here all night,” Rhosh breathed, amused, “with you staring at me like that.”

Louis looked away sharply, two-hundred-fifty-five years of tutored manner not failing, never, ever failing, to potently embarrass him. 

He found himself staring again at the corpse. The old man wore a red-knit cardigan and a woolen fisherman’s sweater beneath. His death-mask was not grotesque: a serene smile, eyes closed, as if he had simply nodded off in his chair and Rhosh had been polite enough to let him sleep. Tucked beneath his cardigan Louis could see a small cross about his neck. He looked away from the corpse again, at the hearth, anywhere but at the two men whom in life and death were equally still. 

The small table that sat between them was only large enough to hold its contents: two glasses, one full and one empty, on a tiny silver tray with a mostly-empty bottle of unlabeled wine. A small paperback lay on the edge of the table before Rhosh, as if he had put it down rather carelessly. Louis made out the title, and felt vaguely, humanly nauseated.

The fire roared. It seemed to Louis that the loudest sound in the room was his own heart. Glancing at Rhoshamandes again, Louis had a brief horror of his complete motionlessness- that he was not even breathing out of habit, that he truly looked like a statue, grave and handsome and terrifying. He might as well be a mountain. 

Finally, Louis swallowed, and summoned the courage for conjecture under the house of a more omniscient god. 

“Your caretaker?” he asked, in a voice that came so hollow he barely recognized it as his own. “Why him?” 

Of course what Louis really meant was: _Why me?_

It seemed Rhoshamandes underwent a total enlivening of his completely-still form, like a stone angel waking from a hundred-year stillness; when he straightened his movements were languid and totally inhuman, as if he were an uncanny machine draped in porcelain flesh.

With a loose gesture, he picked up the paperback on the table and turned to Louis like they’d only just been talking.

“This book is rather good, you know. It is a minor feat. I had almost forgotten; I have not read it in decades.”

Louis’ voice caught in his throat. He wanted to say, _It isn’t my book_. _I didn’t write it._ Rhosh read his mind, so he didn’t have to.

“It is certainly not _the boy_ who penned the tale,” he snorted heavily. “ _Did_ he add anything in?”

Louis closed his eyes and tried not to have conscious thoughts. 

“He only cut certain things,” he responded coolly. He did not want to think of Daniel’s face, to _give it_ to Rhoshamandes by conjuring the image of him. “It was a very long draft from which to edit a coherent story. All sense of structured narrative in the tale is his.”

“Well,” Rhosh laughed, “it has almost no form as a novel at all.” His voice rumbled too-deep, reverberating through the hollow of Louis’ skeleton. “A terribly amateurish job on his part. Or was it yours? _”_

“Mine,” replied Louis flatly. “Certainly.”

Between David and Armand Louis had received a basic, intermittent education in psychic shielding. They had taught him the techniques of defense and respected his efforts: though he had never progressed to creating stronger boundaries, Louis’ friends politely did not step over the short garden walls of his mind. This was _different_. Rhoshamandes’ psychogenic presence was an enormous, unconscious liquid fog whose creeping advances took active effort to repel. 

“Why do you all create such things?” Rhosh asked suddenly, a note of genuine inquisitiveness in his voice. “What about the urge is worth following? I struggle to see how you deal with the futility of the endeavor.”

“Excuse me?” Louis did not follow. The strange, unfamiliar brightness in Rhoshamandes’ eyes made him nervous. 

“The books,” he clarified, clipped and polite like he had practiced the articulation of his tongue into the sharpest possible syllables. “If it were merely Lestat I would think it a foible, but I remember when you _started_ this publication of novels by vampires. How he...” he paused. “...How he brought me this yellowed paperback from the back-shelf of a bookshop in London, all those years ago, and I did not believe him.”

Louis did not open his mouth. 

“Do you want to know what I think of it?” Rhoshamandes asked. 

Louis did not. “If your thoughts are paramount,” he replied. 

“That it was a good novel,” Rhosh said in the tone of a friendly secret, “And that I did not like it then, either.”

Louis was as uneasy as it was possible to be. He felt set adrift; he wished he knew why Rhoshamandes was speaking of this, why he did not simply just threaten him or tell Louis what was to be done with him and get it over with. He could take torture. _This_ was something else. 

“I did not like it then,” Rhosh repeated, and continued: “As I have never liked it. It is a matter of taste, I suppose. The quality of the novel is very good; but the pulp-paperback confessional is a genre best left to the most pitiable of mortals. You all waste your compositional talents in the wrong form: enlightening trash,” he laughed lightly, “is still trash.”

Louis’ frayed nerves caught on the rough edge of the moment and began to unravel.

“I do not wish” he said, in a voice as quiet and firm as he could muster, “to play games with you, Rhoshamandes. I want to know what is _going on_. Tell me for what purpose I have been taken here, for what purpose you have kept me alive, and the nature of your intentions.” 

Rhosh leaned back in his seat and laughed, loud and deep, and just kept laughing.

Louis was chewing the inside of his mouth to shreds. He was aware of a flush rising to his cold cheek. He was very hungry, he realized suddenly; and the tension of his body seemed a vice in which his soul was caught. 

“I’m sorry,” Rhoshamandes laughed, “I _am_ sorry.” He gestured emptily, as if trying to wave his snickers away in the air. “It’s just so funny how frightened of me you are.” 

And then he smiled, almost genially. “You mustn’t be so high-strung when I am _merely being friendly_ with you; impatience is not in your best interest. We have much of importance to discuss, and I _know_ you would not want to impede our colloquium with _melodrama_ . We have not yet had the formal pleasure of each others’ company, Louis,” he grinned, reclining, “and I am simply trying to _get a grasp on you_.”

Louis peered at Rhoshamandes’ friendly face with careful concealment. “‘Much of importance’?” He asked, softly, “to who?”

“To _you,”_ Rhosh smiled, all fang. 

Louis stiffened. His efforts to conceal emotion had not extended to his body: he could only really focus on his mind if he forgot the physical, and his physical form gave the current impression of a cat poised to hiss and claw if one got too close. Rhosh simpered, looking for a second almost tender. He relaxed his shoulders a little, making Louis aware of how high his own were hiked. 

“You are being very brave,” he said, in the consoling tone of a friend whose sneer is masked by sympathy. “But surely you understand the precarious nature of your situation.”

Louis hated that he could no more conceal his thoughts than he could the scent of blood in his pinked face. 

“You must see,” Rhosh continued, all easy affability, “that this is no place to prove your fortitude. I am the arbiter on whose shoulders rest the burden of your future; it would behoove you to be amenable towards me. I have no firm _intention_ with you. I believe it is possible for us to come to an amicable agreement on what we are to do.

“I would like very much,” he said, all comfort, all congeniality, “to _understand_ you, Louis. So choose your words, if you would, for the benefit of my comprehension.” There came again that friendly smile which was completely without warmth. “Do be good for me.”

He crooked an elbow on the arm of his seat. Louis drew back into his chair and watched Rhoshamandes warily. The strange light in his eyes was not merely light; it was a displaced, smouldering heat that unsettled Louis more than anything.

“And do tell me about the books,” Rhosh continued, with the inappropriate pleasantry of a social occasion. “I _am_ genuinely curious. What is the drive to create such populist myth? I would understand if it were for the purpose of beguiling mortals; but it seems delusional to offer oneself up to a human audience with such a desire for _understanding_. The confessional itself seems to involve great self-deception.” The fire in his eyes did not reach the mouth, and the friendliness of the mouth did not reach his eyes. “Does it not?”

Before Louis could say a word Rhoshamandes added in a low and effusive tone: “Do choose your reply carefully.” 

So Louis bit his smarting tongue and measured his words like something far more valuable than his own his life depended on it. Perhaps it did. 

“The books,” he began, cautiously, and then retracted. “The _book_ was not an attempt to be known. _Confession_ implies penance; I spoke with no possibility of atonement in mind. I certainly sought no _understanding._ I was not even sure there was a possibility of being understood.”

“What, then _,”_ Rhosh asked levelly, “ _was_ the purpose?”

Louis opened his mouth, and then faltered- and saw the smug instant in which Rhoshamandes knew his hesitance. He paused again and furrowed his brow. Then he looked up, meeting Rhosh’s eyes with a firm-set mouth.

“I did not dare hope for understanding. I had no illusions of showing us _as we are_ ; I did not know there was an _us_. I barely even knew myself.” Louis frowned, pensively. “There was simply something... which wanted to be articulated. The book was nothing more than an attempt at that articulation. Only… an attempt to speak.”

“It seems futile to me,” Rhosh replied, “to bring our lives to the level of _their_ comprehension. To express intimate griefs as romances because _they_ understand nothing else is touching, sure- but vulgar,” his lip curled, “hopeless. How does one reconcile that?”

Louis blinked. “Hopeless, yes,” he said, “but not vulgar. I reconciled nothing. I did not think to. I was not considering any reader.”

“The origin of vulgarity _is_ hopelessness. And I think,” Rhosh smiled, “that that is the wrong answer. There is always a reader to be considered.”

Louis’ lips drew into a firm line. “I did not consider a _book_ to be _read_. I considered that the tapes might rot in a dump somewhere, or be buried with the body of the boy.”

“Ha!” Rhosh laughed suddenly, and too-loudly. “But to whom were you telling the story?” 

“To the first fool who would listen,” replied Louis flatly.

“Oh,” he chuckled, “but the fool is a proxy. To whom did you imagine telling it?” Rhoshamandes shifted in his seat, sitting up to place the worn paperback on the table again. “When you lay in your dirty room just before dawn, who was in your thoughts?” He had a way of seeming friendly which was completely unfriendly. “You sought any witness, yes. But who was the story _for_?”

Who indeed. Louis had lived a thousand lonely nights in San Francisco before he saw Daniel Molloy’s unshaven jawline and his captivated cigarette stare in the worst bar in the Castro; a thousand nights in the late-night matinees, and he couldn’t have woven a yarn from all those empty hours. When one lives so very long not every misery is _worth_ retelling. And truthfully, between the two of them, Louis had always been the poorer Scheherezade: Lestat, at least, was perfectly willing to sing his sadnesses for a little bit of supper.

But if you have one good story you can keep it in your pocket, like a charm. In the darkness they had grown heavy with enchantment, all those little tales- those thousand lonely nights which had become the one great narrative: the story of how Louis’ life had been with Lestat, and Claudia, and then Armand- and of how without them, finally, it had been nothing at all. When he tried to think objectively of those wasted years he _could not see_ himself: like seeking his reflection in the depths of a too-dark pool. But sometimes, too, it was like he had never left. Like it was still San Francisco, 1970, and _this_ was the changeling life- as the tale had been a spell, and Louis, by its telling, had replaced that lonelier world with this brave new one. 

It seemed he had performed a ritual. Louis had woven the strange and bright future they lived in, woven the _possibility_ as he had woven the narrative- from thin air and desperation, from the last glittering bit of love he had. Tell a story about a lost and shining thing, reassemble all the bones yourself, spill your own blood and something is bound to happen. If you can make a myth that people believe, you’ve got a God; and Louis knew, in his dark heart, that he had crafted the myth of Lestat de Lioncourt himself. 

In that dirty room on Divisadero, he had first spoken the words: _that vampire Lestat,_ and he had told a story which called for a resurrection; all he’d had to do was rise. 

He held Rhosh’s gaze. 

“The book,” said Louis, evenly, “was for me. It was,“ he quoted a poem, “‘a place to put my emptiness, a center that might hold.’ It was the saving of myself from the rot of time.

Only then did he glance away. 

“It was as if,” he continued, in a lower voice, “I was illuminated by it. As if… I had floated, for so long, in darkness; and finally I _saw_ myself. The telling of the tale was the making of a mirror. To whom it was told did not matter; it only required another person for the purpose of self-reflection.”

“You wove a story,” said Rhosh, in a strange, contemplative way- as if he had actually been listening, “about yourself, so that you would _see_ yourself; and in seeing yourself, you would not disappear.”

Louis did not like the tone. “Yes,” he frowned. 

Rhosh glanced up at him suddenly, eyes alighting on Louis’ face as if he had been roused from a momentary reverie. “But the story was not about you. You must know that. You sketch yourself in pencil beside the detailed oils you paint of her and _of_ _him_.”

Louis’ frown deepened. There was something cold under his skin, a weight in his throat.

“Was it for _him_ that you started this?” Rhoshamandes asked, his tone a sickening pleasantness. “Was it for him,” he smiled, “that you saved yourself?”

“What exactly are we here to discuss?” spit Louis’ smarting tongue. 

And Rhosh’s smile fell. He seemed to look away without looking away; past Louis, as if he were seeing something else through him. Louis realized that those eyes were passing over the bookshelves behind him, Rhosh’s pupils moving with that too-fast movement as he read titles from the torn, worn and misplaced spines. 

And then sluggishly his gaze lowered, returned to Earth, and alighted on Louis’ face again with a languid recognition. 

“Your books are books of questions,” Rhoshamandes said, with a quiet directness, “and I do not know you well; nor myself. So I aim to uncover you, and perhaps in the course of this uncovering we shall learn something of me as well.”

“And what about yourself are you hoping to learn _through this_?” Louis asked tersely. His jaw was unbearably tight, his shoulders unbearably tense. 

Rhosh again smiled, simply, this time with feeling: some wistful unhappiness which, for a moment, made him nearly mortal. 

“You are going to tell me,” he murmured, with that far-away look, “the ending to this story. You are going to tell me whether I have any heart left to spare.

So _tell me_ ,” Rhoshamandes continued suddenly and sharply, recovering his manner and adjusting his posture into an easy spread-legged sprawl. “Sate my curiosity of _all_ your new ways. What is Lestat’s love of you that he covets you as his consort, yet does not give you the security of his Blood? Surely he must understand the vulnerability his favoritism lends you. So why does he not make you as strong as himself?”

The discomfort lodged in Louis’ throat took physical form and became a choking weight. Surely Rhoshamandes understood the personal nature of his sudden, invasive inquiry; surely, Louis did not want to know the thoughts that led to his inquiring. But neither was he the first to so explicitly inquire. Louis had politely fielded similarly unsettling interrogation from a yet-more imposing source. 

He spoke slowly and measured carefully his tone. “You are in good company to ask,” he began, intending to quiet the blow of his next words: “Maharet once put a similar question to me, and I shall tell you what I told her.”

The mention of her name flashed something _truly_ unpleasant behind Rhosh’s genial gaze; he smiled wider as if to compensate and Louis resisted shrinking back in his seat. Animal instinct, prey instinct- sometimes a vampire does not smile to express happiness. Sometimes he’s just baring his teeth. 

And Louis had flinched, too, when Maharet had cornered him in a dusty corner of St. Elizabeth’s twenty years ago with that authoritative ‘curiosity’ which he had no choice but to entertain. Like everyone’s nosy relative- she’d been entitled to know. And when she had murmured _I could fix that_ , Louis had struggled to find a way to say ‘No’ which was appropriate to rejecting the advances of a goddess; and like a goddess rejected, she had turned away from him forever after. _We could fix that_ , she had said about him, on that Summer night in 1997; _I could fix you._

He had turned her offer down tactfully; she would never speak to him again. And now she was dead.

“At-”, Louis’ throat was tight with the tension of nerves. Only pride steadied his voice. “At that time, when she asked, I was much different than I am now. I had not so much powerful blood in me. That came,” he exhaled through his teeth, “only after. 

“You must understand,” Louis continued, “how much weaker I was before; though, as I told Maharet then, I did not treasure my weaknesses. I simply did not want,” he swallowed. “To give up the ghost, so to speak. To surrender to the idea of eternity. I wanted very much, at the time, to retain the possibility of a nobler death. To…” 

Louis looked to the side and breathed a humorless laugh. “To keep an eye on that exit sign. That is what I told _her_.”

He never wanted to linger upon that time when Lestat was asleep, or the subsequent events which had ultimately sent him North to Trinity Gate. However, recent circumstances requiring Louis to discuss the technical nature of what had occurred had brought an unpleasant clarity to these recollections. In truth he had preferred his memories of that part of his life to be indistinct; he struggled to spot his own reflection in such a deep well of pain. The curse of time’s passage was that now, when he saw the face of that mad, sad stranger from 1999, Louis was capable of recognizing that it had been himself. 

But there was no use concealing any aspect of the truth from a man who was probably enjoying the tumult of his mind at that very moment. So though his voice dropped almost to a whisper, Louis continued towards those things which lay unspoken.

“I had seen,” he said softly, “what the violation of too much ancient blood could do, Rhoshamandes; what destruction it could wreak upon the mind. It seemed a monstrous freedom to suffer. I was frightened…” he sought the words, speaking steadily, trying not to focus on his audience. 

“I was frightened that I would become unrecognizable to myself," Louis finished. "That I would lose my... reason. That I would drop into the abyss from which one does not return.”

He had been unable to maintain eye contact while he spoke. Now he let his gaze rise, and saw that Rhosh appeared to be considering what he had said. 

“You were afraid of losing control of yourself,” Rhosh remarked in a neutral tone. “Of losing your mind.”

Louis tried to suppress a grimace. “Yes.”

Rhosh chuckled. “Your mind, or your morals?”

The grimace was not suppressed. “I suppose that is true, yes,” Louis replied tersely; “I feared the loss of my ability to _be_ moral-”

“-once the line of choice had been crossed. Yes,” Rhosh finished, understanding; then he looked at Louis directly. 

“What of now?” he asked.

“Now?” Louis echoed.

“Yes,” Rhoshamandes continued, looking _into_ Louis’ eyes suddenly, his expression withering. “What about now? You are no longer that wretched creature, fleeing from the freedom of the dark; yet you hesitate still to embrace it. You live amongst creatures of the night, yet cling to the day. You align yourself with the limitations of humanity even now.” 

The reflection of the hearth burned icily in Rhosh’s eyes. “You are a monster,” he looked intently at Louis, “who will not be a monster for fear of monstrousness.”

“I have not chosen monstrousness as eagerly as some of us do,” interposed Louis coldly.

“Ah, but you miss my point,” Rhosh replied quickly- “ _You are already a monster.”_

His features grew harder, his voice soft. “I see you, Louis de Pointe du Lac, your devotion to your suffering; your suffering which _is_ your morality. Your mortal terrors of true immortality. I do not believe you when you say you do not treasure your weaknesses. Even now.”

The tension of Louis’ body was unbearable. There was again that amusement which did not reach Rhoshamandes’ eyes.

“You seem a poor pick to me,” Rhosh rumbled, “for your Prince’s Court.”

And suddenly Louis laughed, uncontrollable, with the nervous edge of hysteria. “Oh, absolutely! In _that_ respect,” he chuckled, terrified, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

For a moment, a fleeting warmth seemed to pass through Rhoshamandes’ expression: like was looking at Louis and seeing someone else. Time had smoothed away all the fine lines around his eyes, so that he only seemed capable of affection when his features relaxed into the smallest of smiles, enlivening the gaze and returned the feeling to it. Then the ghost of eternity passed across his face again. His expression dropped once more into the flat, deathly look of a statue.

“But you have not actually answered my question.” He intoned firmly. “Louis.”

He did not like hearing his name in that dull tone from this strange mouth. 

“I did not ask why you have maintained this _choice_ not to take powerful blood. I asked you why he _allowed_ it.” 

Louis blinked. 

“You, I understand; no wonder your book is so full of human things,” Rhosh laughed tonelessly. “You are so humanly limited. It is _his_ implicit decision that I cannot comprehend. That he would allow such a beloved fledgling to make such a foolish _choice_ is beyond me. Why does he not overrule you? He is the Prince, is he not?”

Before Louis could open his mouth, Rhosh continued: 

“If he is your Prince, he wields his power with dangerous sentimentality. I could not imagine,” his mouth twisted, “endangering a fledgling with such public attention and keeping him powerless to protect himself, all for some maudlin philosophy.”

Rhoshamandes laughed to himself, in a manner as if Louis was not there; and it seemed for a moment like he really was not.

“No,” he continued, “It is hard to believe that reasoning for such a foolish _choice_ on _his_ part. I cannot _imagine_ any Maker who wanted to keep his fledgling for very long choosing _not_ to impart the totality of his strength on him. He would have to work very hard to protect such a vulnerable favorite for all eternity.”

Rhosh leaned his jaw into his palm. Then he raised his eyebrows, as if he had thought of something. “Not, I suppose, that I do not see the appeal,” he noted aloud, looking askance and considering- “Perhaps a weak man keeps his beloveds vulnerable so he has something to protect."

Louis sat with some dread creeping over the back of his neck, some dread which was as-of-yet unnameable; some understanding of the situation which he did not want to understand. _Why am I here_ gnawed in the back of his skull like a terrified, trapped animal. And _why are we talking about this._

Rhosh’s gaze slid over to Louis to pay him a sudden, sly and discomforting attention. 

“Not, of course,” Rhosh continued, turning head and shoulder in his seat to face him, “That Lestat has the means to protect you, since you _are_ _here_. It would behoove him to look after his most fragile fledgling next time.” He exhaled a soft chuckle. “A fine job he has done with you, keeping such a vulnerable creature on his arm. I did not even have to _try_.” 

Rhoshamandes’ voice was _almost_ unmocking. “I would never put a fledgling in such a public position of helplessness,” he said, _almost_ thoughtfully. “I wonder how much care for you he really has.”

Louis did not know what to say. All the right words, the brave words, had dried up in his mouth.

“I simply mean,” Rhosh continued after a pensive moment, going from statue to animate again with a blink and a gesture, “If I had a fledgling so relatively crippled, I would not surround him with ancients whose agendas are all their own; nor would I invite every lost stranger into my home and trust them to be mindful of his _constitution_ ,” he laughed airily again, like the idea of allowing Louis to socialize with other, stronger vampires was very funny indeed. “Nor would I entrust him to the care of my oldest enemy,” he scoffed, “or let him wander astray for so many years when he was so defenseless! I mean,” he gestured broadly,

“I do not think I would ever let you leave the _house_ as you are now. It seems _more_ than careless of him to not acknowledge your weakness in the world outside of your rooms. Even if that is where he intended to keep you.”

Louis blinked this time from the dull registrar of what he was _really_ hearing. But then Rhosh turned to stare him straight in the eyes, addressing him directly; and unable to turn away Louis saw it writ large upon his ancient features- the perfect mask of pity. 

“So I wonder,” Rhosh drawled. _Utter_ pity. Even his smile was piteous. “How much he really cares for you at all. Considering that you are here, that I have captured you, and that it was no trouble at all because he has neither made you strong enough to defend yourself nor intervenes to protect you when you are endangered. Honestly, I am surprised; I expected more of a fight for his favorite.”

“Perhaps,” Louis began to reply, slowly. The fear filling his brain was like mercury sludge eating away at his ability to process what was happening. “Perhaps he believes that I am capable of keeping myself alive in the intermediate,” he murmured, and as he spoke it he thought of Lestat and all his fussing and knew it was utterly untrue. 

Rhosh laughed wholeheartedly, the kind of laugh that echoed through Louis’ chest hollowly and just kept going. 

“Perhaps,” he said, “he loves you for your weakness. He so loves human weakness, does he not?” He was still smiling. “Perhaps he loves you for your resemblance to them. The tender _need_ of you. A delicate flower to protect or to crush on whim; he would not be the first blood-drinker I’ve known who prefers his beloved enthralled. Is that it? Does he prefer the illusion of a _thrall_ in you? Beauty bruisable,” Rhosh laughed, “but too immortal to really break?”

Louis was biting his tongue so hard it bled, feeling a vile and traitorous heat creep across his face, trying to make his thoughts blank, to make them not burn. But when Rhoshamandes looked at him, Louis knew that he knew; knew he could smell the blood in his mouth. 

“I simply mean,” Rhosh continued sharply, “that I cannot imagine another ulterior motive to allow such fragility except that he _prefers you that way_. The incongruity of your frailty with his strength is not that of a fledgling and his Maker. It is more like a monster and a man.”

He was looking at Louis in a way that could almost be mistaken, by a fool, as sympathetic. But Louis was no fool. Pity is the tenderness one feels for a beautiful animal walking wordlessly towards the slaughterhouse: it is the fondness a man has for his meat.

“Is he a beast,” asked Rhosh, in his low, tender voice, full of poison charity, “who needs his beauty to play Prince? How long ago did he promise you would one day see his human face?”

“I don’t know what you mean by any of this,” Louis almost snapped. “And I think that whatever mark you are aiming for is one which you lack the proper insight to hit.”

“You are a _wonderful_ actress, Louis,” murmured Rhosh. The French that crept into his breath when he said the name was not Louis’ French. It was an accent from somewhere, sometime else. “You pretend such faith in _his_ hope. You could fool any other man. But you are like a pretty girl,” his voice dropped, “with an unfading bruise. One simply cannot help but wonder if you are so foolish as to really _believe_ what you say.”

Louis inhaled, slowly, through his nose. He wished to close to his eyes, to be anywhere else. “If I am only here to listen to you _talk_ before my execution,” he murmured, “I would prefer we expedite the hanging.” 

And Louis tilted his face up, slant of his green gaze peering at Rhoshamandes’ face from beneath a fallen curl. “Is that not my purpose here?” he asked, evenly. “To die, and make him suffer?”

“Well,” Rhosh replied, still friendly, “to make him suffer, yes.”

Rhoshamandes shifted in his seat, raising his head from his hand, and sat up. Louis realized suddenly how very tall he was. 

“I cannot blame you,” he continued in a low drawl, “for nursing his newfound optimism. It is such a radiant hope in which to pretend belief; and you both have great reason to want to believe that _love shall make you good_.”

His tone dropped flat again. He turned his head towards the fire, looking only at Louis from the corner of his eye. 

“But you do know,” he said, “that your love will not save him. And certainly, it will not save _you_. ”

He did not want Rhoshamandes to look into his mind and see: how when Lestat had climbed atop Armand’s makeshift council table at Trinity Gate three years ago and sauntered with rolling hips down those unsteady islands of oak, voice low with madman confidence- how when he’d swung that axe and brought its arc to an end at the bend-point of Rhosh’s elbow- that Louis had found himself, then, smiling down the length of that room and thinking that **there** was the tyrant he’d fallen in love with. That what Rhosh spoke of now had been for centuries the internal dialogue of Louis’ heart and mind, and the last and most recent shame had been the self-realization that he _did not want to be saved._

And so he held his tongue and mind fast, thinking of anything else besides how the sting of Lestat’s fangs had been for him the first taste of something real.

“I have loved too long and too well,” Louis said, slowly, “to believe that love will make us _good_. I don’t think love makes anyone good. I only suspect that it is what makes us _us_.”

Rhosh exhaled, like a sigh, and Louis felt the long low roll of the laughter in his breath.

“I cannot disagree,” he chuckled, “with _that._ ” 

The humor had gone from Rhoshamandes’ eyes; he was not mocking anymore. “I wonder,” he said, in a tone much more subdued, “when was the last time I could have believed in such romantic principles. If there were ever such a time at all.” He looked off, slowly. “I do not put much faith in poetry. Such philosophy,” he continued quietly, “it is beautiful; but useless. It is all just _art_.”

His jaw clenched firmly, his brow furrowed. He glanced down. Then he looked up at Louis again with a plain, cold expression. “I think you all believe too much.” 

“Believe too much,” replied Louis with a careful, measured wariness, “in what?”

Rhoshamandes shrugged. “In yourselves. In anything. In everything,” he laughed again, “you believe too much. You have faith for the sake of faith. You make art for the sake of art, and call that _meaning_ ; as you make love for the sake of love, and call _that_ meaning. You have named an emotion _meaning_. And so all your faith is only in this _feeling_ , which you call _beauty_ , and _love_ , and which is _nothing_ at all but belief in believing- it is self-perpetuating. And there is nothing behind it but the desire to perpetuate.”

“You think it is all,” replied Louis evenly, without the tone of a question, “mere sentiment.”

Rhosh sighed, long and low, and there flickered across his eyes a look which Louis understood: like he, too, felt this was a conversation he’d been having only recently. 

“I think it is _irrational_ ,” he sighed. “Your hope for goodness is hopeless. And so you have your pleasures, and you call them _good_ , and you are deluded.”

“I do not hope,” said Louis softly, “for goodness, Rhosh. I gave up on goodness long ago. If you are looking to talk about _goodness_ , you are speaking to the wrong man.

Rhoshamandes snorted. “Then what is the function of _love_ which lends meaning? _What do you hope for?_ ”

Louis looked down at his hands, clasped in his lap. Absently he toyed with the fraying hem of the long off-white robe. In the low light he could see that it was more old and worn than he had originally supposed it to be. He drew it around himself compulsively, though he was no longer cold; only vulnerable. Abruptly it struck him that Rhoshamandes was too broad-shouldered to have ever worn this. It must have been Benedict’s.

Louis thought about his answer, and finally he looked up again at Rhosh; but he did not meet his eyes.

“I only hope,” he said, and his throat tightened, “that some night, there will be reason to hope. It is not that love is _good_ ; it is that until that night comes when there _is_ hope, we have no other meaning. We have nothing but ourselves, and we are all in the dark, and all we can do is reach out, into the darkness, and hold each other’s hands.

Do you understand?” Louis asked, and slowly- carefully- he raised his eyes and looked into Rhoshamandes’ face. “With all we know about existence, we still have no other concept of goodness which extends beyond the basic acts of love towards one another. So, it is not that love is _good_. It is that we... are simply... all we have.”

“What you are telling me,” replied Rhosh flatly, “is that we have nothing. That there is no hope which is sure, or concrete, and so we have no hope.”

And Louis simply shrugged. “Nothing is concrete,” he said. “So, if you believe that we have only those things which are _concrete_ \- you are correct. We have nothing.”

Rhoshamandes was looking down. He seemed to be thinking. He did not respond and, in the warm darkness of the room which they shared, they fell into silence together. 

Louis was trying not to think too clearly or specifically; though his mind felt hollowed-out by the enormity of fear and swept free of all its usual clutter, he still did not want Rhosh to overhear any errant ideas. But in the quiet his thoughts wandered. He found himself thinking absently of the coming-together of many vampires, and what it had illuminated about them as a people: the common loves and fears, shared weaknesses, the strength and fragility of a crowd. Previously, there had never _been_ a crowd. The lives of individual blood-drinkers had been isolate, each seeming to float forever across eternity in their own little lifeboats. 

He was thinking of how he had so recently met so many ancient vampires- and how the revelation of all that living history in one place had simply been that all of history had been lived. The world was full of witnesses. But the real surprise had been, for Louis, that those who had witnessed the most- who had lived and loved and endured for millennia- were as lost as those who had seen barely anything at all. 

He _did not want_ to think of Maharet, who was buried under the good Yew in the yard behind Trinity Gate: how she had lived nearly six-thousand years only to be defeated by the heartbreak of a loss which, truly, she had experienced in the first twenty. It had only been the hope of one day recovering her connection which had sustained her. Faced, finally, with the hopeless reality of Mekare’s condition, she had sunken into the same simple despair which had devoured Louis years ago. He, the nearly-mortal, had survived it; and she, the goddess, had surrendered to the first machete-blade which promised an escape. 

No knowledge nor witness nor the illumination of time had provided the answer to that simple question: how to continue, and _why_. Almost two-hundred years ago, Armand had sat in the very tower in which Lestat was murdered and told Louis that the true killer of vampires was time; time, which brought with it loneliness, and loneliness which was the sword upon which blood-drinkers thrust themselves. 

“You know,” said Rhoshamandes, slowly. He had not been listening to Louis’ thoughts. It seemed like he was turning an idea over in his own mind. “I think perhaps I have reached the end of my life. I feel quite as if I am at my natural close. Yet, still, I continue.”

Louis did not say, _what do you mean_. He knew what Rhoshamandes meant. Yet it seemed Rhosh himself did not. 

“As if…” Rhosh looked beyond him, contemplative; but his tone remained afraid to touch down. “As if my body has died to all sensation. As if there were nothing left on this Earth to sustain me, and so I feel nothing; and those things that once brought me joy are grotesque, because I look at them and feel nothing. All that has enlivened me for so long is gone. It is as if I am already dead.”

A thoughtful quiet had passed over the room. Rhoshamandes turned again to look into the fire, as if he sought to see something in it. 

“Has it been very sudden?” Louis murmured into the dark. 

Rhosh seemed to think. 

"No,” he replied, finally, looking up again at Louis with a sort of understanding in his eyes, “No, not when I consider it. In fact, it seems as if perhaps I had been dead for a very long time, and only in losing what quickened me did I realize I have been a corpse.”

A beat. 

“Aren’t we all?” Louis said, a joke in the twist of his lip.

Rhoshamandes snorted. “I put no stock in that old poetry. Vampires are not dead things; if we were animate corpses, we would shamble and rot. I do not believe,” he uttered a little laugh, “in the language of B-movies. No.” He sighed. “We are not dead. Death would not explain this depth of feeling.”

Louis glanced away and for a moment he half-suppressed a small smile at the familiar sentiment of the conversation. 

Rhoshamandes had looked past him again, past even the hearth. 

“But myself,” he continued, seeming again like he was thinking out loud, “I feel as if I am dead. Or, I feel nothing- and so I am dead. I am a star,” he smiled briefly, “whose light still shines upon the Earth when for a thousand years I have already been burnt out.” His voice had dropped to a low murmur. He was considering something deeply. And somehow, in the moment, he seemed deeply aged. 

“Perhaps there _is_ an entropy of immortality,” he said quietly; “Perhaps there is a rot of the soul when it can no longer sustain itself. Perhaps... this is it.”

The fire burned, and for a moment the two men sat in silence, as if they were simply two men and not so much more.

Finally, Louis ventured. 

“It does not seem to me,” he spoke gingerly, “as if your soul had been sustained by itself all this time. You have suffered a great loss.”

Rhosh exhaled a low laugh, surprising him; and for a moment he looked so flushed that he seemed almost simply, grandly human.

“No,” he chuckled deeply. “No, I certainly have not been sustained by myself. For the longest time, I thought…” he trailed off, brow furrowed. “No. You are right,” Rhosh said softly, with some surprise, “as right as I have been about you.”

Louis frowned. “Perhaps the one thing of importance that I have recently learned is that most vampires are the same: we must seek those things that sustain us.”

Rhosh distractedly rested his cheek in the curve of his hand. He looked into the fire; but from the corners of his eyes he watched Louis. A flicker of warmth, perhaps an effect of the light, played across his face. “Are we? The same?”

Louis continued cautiously. 

“Only… in that we require things outside ourselves to buoy us. We cannot live on our eternities alone. Our souls _do not sustain themselves_ , and so we must seek... for meaning. We must-” Louis furrowed his brow. There was the distinct feeling, again, that he had been having this conversation only recently with someone else. 

“We must do _work_ to keep living. The search for common comforts- it is _work_. Immortality is not Life, lasting forever; without the active seeking of beauty, it is simply a sustained and habitual survival.”

Rhosh chuckled loudly and it reverberated through the quiet room. “Ah, fledglings,” he exhaled, “How I forget you know nothing of survival yet.” But the laughter was mirthless. “How easy it is to remain in perpetual motion. To simply _sustain_.”

Louis was looking at the fire. He was thinking of how easy it had been to resist the pull of life when he had no interest in _living_ ; how simple to flee from what tethered him to this Earth and float, and float, and float, a half-drowned man in a starlit sea, neither dead not quite alive. 

“Is it?” he asked. “Our bodies merely resist senescence. Perhaps we must learn to do the rest ourselves.”

“What has sustained you?” Rhosh asked disarmingly. In surprise Louis looked at him; their eyes met. 

And their gazes held. Louis opened his mouth and stuttered, feeling whatever answer he had die on his lips. Instead, to his own surprise, something slipped past his tongue which sounded strangely like the truth. 

“The gravity,” said Louis, slowly, holding Rhoshamandes’ cold gaze, “of love. It…” He could not maintain the eye contact. He broke away, and looked at his hands as he murmured: “It has been the only anchor heavy enough to tether a man to life for eternity.”

Louis stared at the foreign shapes of his fingers, curled in his lap, with a furrowed brow, and thought. When Rhoshamandes responded he did not look at Louis. They did not look at each other.

“I could not begin to believe, now,” murmured Rhosh, from somewhere in the dark, “in that kind of hope. That _meaning_. Love is very beautiful. But it is _only_ beautiful.”

Slowly Louis looked up, and he saw Rhoshamandes, looking up, and staring at him with a strange intensity in his blue eyes; and for a moment he had the strange feeling that he’d never really seen the man before. 

“I do not even believe in your _us_ ,” Rhosh continued. “When you say we are the same- who is _we_? We do not sustain ourselves. And there is no future of us because there is no _us_. When I look into the future, I see…” 

He trailed off. Instead of looking past Louis, as he had done previously, he turned his head suddenly in a quick gesture of unusual self-consciousness. 

“I see only,” said Rhoshamandes, looking again into the hearth, “the deep dark unknowing.”

Louis quoted softly: “‘The nothingness shows through.’”

Rhosh chuckled. It seemed he could not suppress it. But he looked away. “Yes,” he said quietly. “‘The nothingness shows through.’ Beautiful things, they are beautiful. But they are as a gossamer veil. And behind them is _nothing_.”

Louis knew that nothing. He had spent an eternity wanting nothing more than that deep, dark unknowing: centuries looking longingly into the void, throwing himself away. He knew what it was like to _be_ nothing. And he knew what it was like to be ripped from nothing into _something_. 

Into the vast space, the gap of infinite darkness between them he asked: “Do you want to know?” 

Rhosh blinked, roused from thought, and looked up at Louis with a softly-furrowed brow. 

“Know what?” he said, with the soft perplexity of a genuine question.

“The future,” said Louis softly. But it was not quite what he had meant. There were not words for what he really meant. “The meaning of _us_.”

There was a long emptiness. The hearth burned. And to his own surprise, Louis looked at Rhoshamandes and met his eyes easily. And Rhosh looked at him, his pupils moving slowly over Louis’ face; seeming, for a moment, to really see him. 

And then, with an even finality he replied: “Why would I?

“Why would I choose,” Rhoshamandes muttered, looking deeply into Louis’ eyes, “to put faith in a lie? I am not _like you_. I do not seek meaning for meaning’s sake. I have watched, for millennia, men go mad with the search for meaning; mad enough to make up their own,” he scoffed. “It is all hollow. It is all shadowed in despair.”

In Rhosh’s _faith_ Louis heard an unusual pronunciation, a strange syllabic emphasis in which there seemed an echo of Old French. _Faith_ had never been Louis’ forte. For so long Louis had believed only in disbelief; but over time this disbelief had become, itself, a kind of belief, a faith in faithlessness which required a constant toiling work of distrust. By 1999, Louis had ceased to look for any kind of meaning. The world had become an even, flat plain of meaninglessness in which nothing had weight. He had believed in nothing at all. He had not even believed in himself. He had trusted nothing. There had been no possibility of truth. 

After a pause, Louis quietly asked: “What _did_ you believe in? What... _has_ sustained you?”

“Oh,” replied Rhosh, shifting in his seat. A little wistfulness passed across his face. “At my worst it was always the simple objectivity of beauty; how eternal it seemed, how immovable. That beauty would always return, I believed that; and I think _that_ is where we are the same.” He looked warm to Louis, for a moment. But then his brow furrowed. 

“But now,” he continued, “when I look upon beauty it is unbearable. It does not save me. It is not enough.” An ancient bitterness took hold in his low tone. “I look at beauty now and all I see is the ugliness of impermanence, of… change. It is all temporal: nothing which is beautiful _stays_. It is as if I have _outlived_ beauty. As if it had betrayed me. And for that, I want… I want to destroy it.”

“Is there not something tender,” pressed Louis, cautiously, “in what is transitory?”

“No,” Rhosh laughed; “that is your maudlin mortal philosophy talking. True beauty is evanescent, yes; is fleeting; and it is in the hopelessness of this impermanence that vulgarity has always reigned.” The sudden acerbic lilt in his voice caught Louis off guard and unsettled him. 

“We,” said Rhosh, “are the only beautiful things which last forever. And then again,” he chuckled, but the humor ran out halfway; his tone dropped flat as if dragged down by the weight of his words. “We do not.”

Rhoshamandes turned his head, slowly, off to the side. There was a flicker of unreadable feeling in his eyes. When he spoke again his voice was almost a murmur.

“I have been alive,” he said, slowly, “five-thousand years.” In that moment, _did_ Louis see it. “Five-thousand years, and the only truly enduring thing I have seen is fear. It is in the cradle and the grave and the shadow behind all art. Beauty is a mirror without backing; death lies in a shade over love and soils it. The world always returns to darkness.”

He broke the eye contact abruptly. His whole body turned towards the hearth as if he were finished. The words hung in the air. The shadows of the room were a shifting sea around them. Louis found himself looking up- behind Rhosh, at the bookshelves, at the rafters and nothing in particular. Looking, he supposed, into the darkness. 

Then came Rhoshamandes’ voice in the quiet, a murmur.

“I would like….” he began. Louis’ eyes were drawn back to his face: but Rhosh did not acknowledge his look. He stared at the hearth as if deeply considering the properties of flame. “I would like to tell this world something which might truly be eternal. Something it could not ignore, which it would see, and remember. Love is a pitiful story, lasting only as long as it is told; I would cast a mirror at fear. I would like... to show...” 

His expression had grown deeply shadowed. “To show them how we lived. That we were here.”

“How you lived?” Asked Louis delicately. So delicately. “In fear?”

Rhosh glanced at Louis and he looked all five-thousand of his years. Then his pupils slid slowly back around to the hearth.

“Is there any other way?” he asked. But it was not a question. 

In the dim his overcast profile was gravely, devastatingly handsome. Louis let himself really look. Most ancient blood-drinkers do not really look like people: they look like history, and Rhoshamandes looked, behind the burning of his eyes, like the history of every sorrow since the dawn of the world. 

“What will you do?” Louis finally asked. His voice had lowered to an almost respectful whisper.

“Ah,” replied Rhosh, in a quick and assured way, as if this were an afterthought whose practicalities he had much considered; and when he looked up at Louis quite quickly his expression was suddenly stripped bare of any feeling at all. “I am going to kill him, of course, your Prince; eventually I will take something he loves enough to fight for it, and I shall kill him. Perhaps it will make me _feel_ better.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Then I shall level things with your Court, if they still exist, as I should like to be left in peace. After that?” Rhosh shrugged easily. “I do not know. Perhaps… I will leave here.” 

He glanced around the darkened room, eyes scanning slowly over the shadowy rafters, the askew furniture; the ruined library and its waterfalls of books. His tone grew soft again when he murmured: “This place was not designed for only one.”

Rhosh was looking up into the dark rise of the mangled shelves, eyes flickering across titles- remembering something. Louis followed his gaze and saw more clearly the ages as they had passed across these bookcases. On the shelves that climbed towards the ceiling were volumes so old they were nothing but sheaves of parchment; as one moved closer to the floor the contents modernized, until most of what spilled out around them seemed to be paperback titles released in the last ten years. Louis thought, suddenly, how long and how thorough of an effort it must have taken to collect all these books, and how quick and easy it had been to destroy a collection that represented so many years of life together. 

Then he thought of the hundreds of films in foot-after-foot of cabinet in the next room, and he thought of a thousand nights in the matinees of San Francisco, and he thought how lonely Benedict must have been, how lonely in this fur-lined dungeon that had been built for his protection. 

“No,” said Rhosh suddenly, so soft it was barely above a whisper. Louis had almost forgotten the tension of their being there together. It had seemed for a moment they were lost in the same thoughts. “No, this place was not built for one. I shall surely leave here, and travel… while I look for a new place. Somewhere secure, impenetrable.” He sighed almost inaudibly. “A new life.”

Louis looked at Rhoshamandes straight-on and in the firelight he saw not a five-thousand-year-old vampire, but a very tired man who had been going for a very long time. Of course, one made the best _of_ eternity; but were any of them really made _for_ it? 

Louis’ mouth flattened into a hard line. There were more pressing matters. Such as:

“Where do I factor into this?” Louis asked in a polite, tempered tone. 

“Hm?” Rhosh’s eyes flickered back to him from the gloom.

“In your grand plans for the fearful future,” Louis pressed. “Why have I factored into them?”

Rhoshamandes looked at him; saw him again; and slowly, he began to smile. At first it was the subtle shifting of light on his face. Then Louis watched cautiously as Rhosh’s awareness of their situation returned. He did not like the smile. It seemed unpleasantly, smugly enlightened by some contemplation that had only occurred to him now.

Louis was regretting making such an outward reference to his predicament, sure now that in his boldness he had only managed to broadcast the exact extent of his vulnerability. 

Rhoshamandes face had lit again with that weird, unsettling fire, a subtle too-bright glow behind his eyes that told Louis- like the alertness of some big cat when it has spotted prey- that he had moved too fast, and now he was caught.

"Hm," Rhosh hummed, then paused. Then he smiled, bright and deliberate, tips of his fangs gleaming ivory in the warm glow.

“I could keep you,” he said to Louis, with a matter-of-fact pleasantness. “You are rather beautiful. I certainly do not begrudge Lestat his taste; you would make a stunning de Landen, with a bit of my Blood inside you.”

All the words he could have possibly said in reply evaporated in Louis’ mouth, as futile and dry as a Gobi suicide. 

Rhosh was thoughtful, having thoughts he seemed to be enjoying. 

“You would be very safe,” he continued evenly, raising his eyebrows; as if it seemed, to him, a more-than-fair option to give. “It would be an objective improvement for you. You would not be a target, under my protection, for any monster who wanted to take you.”

Louis was genuinely unsure about the level of irony intended by that statement. His brain was running too fast from a sickening realization to make any calls about the current moment. 

“Originally I took you as an asset for negotiation,” Rhosh continued. Oh, _ransoming_ \- Louis should have figured that was his formal purpose here, but his mind was spinning, putting together all the implications which lay right in front of him; which he had been trying, so desperately, not to see. Ransom-material was why he had been kidnapped, sure. But _here,_ to Saint Rayne, in this apartment, these very rooms. 

“I would have returned you,” continued Rhosh lightly, “after your Maker’s death in exchange for a truce- that I be left in peace and not bothered out of any petty vengeances. But as I consider it now, I am sure I will have enough leverage once the Prince is gone that such a _terrible_ waste would not be necessary.”

Louis swallowed, opened his mouth and closed it.

“A waste?” He finally managed. His voice did not seem his own. It had not been his all night: but now, Louis finally recognized the vampire this voice belonged to. It seemed to be the voice of another Louis who, a long time ago, had lived in nothing but fear. 

“Well, you are much beloved!” Rhosh laughed suddenly and loudly as if it were all very obvious. “But when they install a new Prince, I am sure he will come with a new consort, too, don’t you think? Without your Master you would have such little protection; a terribly vulnerable position to deposit you into back at the Court. To put such a prize as yourself,” he smiled widely, “in such a position would be, I daresay, _a waste_.”

Louis stared at the length of Rhoshamandes’ fangs, which were much like Lestat’s: a full set of primaries, seconds and tertiaries, just right for ripping. 

“I am sure someone would move to care for you,” continued Rhosh with a bright pleasure, “but a former Favorite is little more than a temporary amusement. You would have to rely on your,” that smile grew _wolfish_ as he spoke, “ _considerable_ charms to secure a place. The shift in power structures would not be in your favor. You would be another man’s most-beloved burden.

Or,” he chuckled, as if finding this possibility _particularly_ funny, “a prize for Armand, beholden forever until his past caught up and used you as the vehicle of its vengeance. With powerful Blood, you would not be beholden to anyone; you would be free.”

The hearth burned steadily, an indifferent witness to horror. Louis sat at a loss for reaction. He could only think that understanding was a curse, and his straightforward self-deception had been the only force that kept him going. With comprehension came fear, and fear had finally led him by the hand to its inevitable conclusion.

Louis was staring into the fire not thinking about anything. Not thinking about the way Rhoshamandes had said _considerable charms_. Then he _was_ thinking, willing the hearth to burn out or to flare; willing a log to fall, a twig to spark, willing the worn red Persian rug before the grate to catch and immolate them both, to devour the moment in flames. Louis hadn’t, that he knew of, acquired the ability to make the Fire yet. The last time he had tried, he’d found himself needing to do it the old-fashioned way- with gasoline and a burst boiler- even though for a moment he had thought himself angry enough to burn the whole world for Rose Fischer’s suffering. 

Nothing happened. The stable burn of the flames was an apathetic spectator, callously condoning the entire affair by its constance; its refusal to acknowledge what occurred before its fiery eye. And Louis had found himself wanting nothing more than that witness, someone to name his dread for what he himself could not bear to think of it as; anyone at all who would see and acknowledge _for_ him, who would look at the situation and calmly say: you are absolutely not going to be alright. 

With a dumb tongue he finally managed: “I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

It was not what he meant. It was not even the truth.

Rhosh smiled politely and sat up a bit straighter. “Surely you know what I mean,” he responded. “You are far from stupid.”

Louis knew he was cornered already and Rhosh seemed determined to back him in even further. “I am making you an offer,” he began, his voice dropping down again to that knowing, low roll. “My good friend.”

And here Rhoshamandes leaned forward and, without breaking their eye contact, took Louis’ limp left hand between his two much-larger ones. Louis tensed. Before he could speak- not that he was even capable of thinking- Rhosh continued. 

“I believe it could be a beneficial arrangement on both of our behalves, given the inevitabilities we discussed. I am really an agreeable man; I despise conflict; and I am sympathetic towards the vulnerability of your current condition. You will be in an even worse one when Lestat is dead.” Louis’ breath was caught in his chest like someone was pressing on his diaphragm. He could feel Rhoshamandes running the tip of his thumb, in small circles, over the ring which Louis wore on his left index; as if he wanted to wear off its polish. Louis felt the ring begin to rotate under the pressure and yanked his hand away. 

Rhosh tilted his head and looked at Louis with a pitying sort of clemency. “To be a well-loved heirloom for the next Prince, dependent upon his graciousness and unable to defend yourself, well-” Every smile became unpleasant when one understood its implications. “It would be better to chance _my_ good-will than that of a Court to whom you no longer serve a purpose.”

He lowered his voice to finish. Louis could feel the enveloping power of the sound in the hollows of his own chest like a hypnotism. He recalculated Rhoshamandes’ age involuntarily. More horror.

“Frankly,” Rhosh rumbled, “My magnanimity would favor you in many ways. You should be so blessed to be offered such a timely opportunity to break your bonds.” His smile had become a smirk of smug knowing. “It is in your power to acquire more power.”

“More power?” Louis uttered in surprise, voice a fragile breath. Beyond terrified, he almost laughed in disbelief at the implication he might feel anything else. “Why would I want _power_?”

Rhosh raised his eyebrows. “You might, next time, avoid abduction,” he drawled, gesturing languidly to emphasize the obviousness of his point. “Look at yourself.” He slouched in his seat, spread his legs and watched Louis with the warm and friendly glint of total madness in his eyes. “Shackled to the power of stronger men, as much prey to your dependence as it protects you. You fear the strength my Blood would confer. You are a sufferer so used to suffering you cannot imagine yourself without.”

Seeing his leg caught in the trap, Louis murmured: “But would I not, then, be dependent upon _your_ power?”

“Well,” Rhosh simpered like he had been caught in a slyness, eyes moving over Louis with a warm and hungry attention that seemed now, less like fondness and more preprandial appraisal. 

“Well,” he laughed softly. “I can be a very good god.”

The hearth burned and burned and Louis de Pointe du Lac considered his options, or lack thereof.

Louis looked up slowly. He felt like a weight had attached itself to all his movement. Then he surprised himself. 

“You didn’t do this to Gabrielle,” he asked without asking, the words slipping out quietly into the air and the conscious part of Louis’ brain too filled with the static of fear to catch them.

Rhosh barked a laugh. “Ha! Absolutely not. I had no such interest. And returning her to the hands of the Great Sevraine would scarcely endanger her. But you, I find put in an uncomfortable position by all of this,” Louis could not stop looking at the tips of his eyeteeth, lengthy enough to glint whitely about his lips when he spoke. “And I would _so hate_ for you to be uncomfortable. I have found you a good evening companion for conversation.”

One did not need to be a mindreader, Louis’ lucid thoughts- the ones he was trying so hard to veil- told him; one did not need to be a mindreader to know what Rhoshamandes thought he was good for. 

“When I say no,” Louis asked flatly, though it was not a question and he did not phrase it as one. “What will happen.”

“Well,” replied Rhosh evenly, a faintly mocking fairness in his voice. “Since I have figured I haven’t need of you for bargaining, you will probably die. I believe that will send a much more coherent message to your Court than trying to engage them on sympathetic ground.”

“And what message, exactly,” Louis pushed, “will be sent to them if I say yes?”

“‘I win,’” Rhoshamandes replied, with teeth. 

Louis blinked and furrowed his brow and replied with the devastating earnestness of a man who knew he had no choice of machinations. 

“Then I would prefer that you kill me.” He knew what Rhosh heard in his mind; he heard _I had expected something worse_. “I would take death over torture any day.”

Rhosh snorted dismissively. “Oh, I don’t think it would be torture,” he said, with the tone of a man convincing a stubborn child to eat his vegetables. Then, as if considering the idea merely in the hypothetical, he asked lightly: “But if I _did_ torture you?”

“You would get nothing from me that would make torture worthwhile,” replied Louis firmly. “I have stubbornness without stamina; I would die fast and quiet. I would prefer that you _kill me now_ instead of extending the lot of my life,” he found himself saying, words slipping past the static of his mind; past fear; words pursuing their truth, “in the _pleasure_ of your _company_ , Rhosh. If those are the two options, I choose death.”

When he finished, Louis realized that Rhoshamandes was smiling.

“Killing you _now,”_ he interjected, in the tone of an amicable negotiation, “was not _quite_ what I had in mind.”

Then he shrugged loosely. “Heaven forbid you give me a good evening. It’s only your own eternity.”

“Any eternity would be wasted with you,” Louis replied with the bitter burning pride of someone who would suffer unto death for the dignity of dying.

“Fledgling,” Rhosh breathed, a bit of disbelief- or pity- cast across his face. “Perhaps you would have lived long, were he not your Maker.”

“I never wanted to live long,” Louis spoke slowly and clearly. “I stumbled by accident into immortality.”

“Is that true?” Rhoshamandes asked; but it did not have the tone of a question. He turned to Louis, seeming to study his expression. Louis knew, uncomfortably, that Rhosh was reading his mind and wanted him to know it. A faint smile played across the old monster’s face. 

“You know,” he hummed to the tune of smugness, “I have long found human legends to hold many _allegorical_ truths about us. That we cannot cross running water- a foolish myth owing to mortal misunderstandings of our territorial habits. Do you understand?”

Louis’ eyes narrowed. The tension between them was palpable, like waves of heat from the warmth of the fire, like a hot Southern night when the humidity hung in the air like a whole ocean unto its own. 

Rhosh laughed softly. “Strings of garlic,” he continued, “The scent is merely pungent to a creature with elevated senses. Do you get my meaning, Louis?”

Louis swallowed the uncomfortably-sudden address and did not move. Did not take his eyes from the other, older man. Did not untense his shoulders. 

Rhoshamandes’ face broadened into the mirthless smile of a vampire who wants you to see his teeth.

“I have lived long enough,” he began again, “to understand the grain of truth in the legend that says a blood-drinker cannot work his will upon a human who does not not _invite him in_. I believe this owes to a particular dynamic between humanity and vampires. Do you follow?” Louis did not follow. Or he did not _want_ to follow. 

“I wonder,” Rhoshamandes’ voice dropped into a low purr. Velvet seduction. “If there are _any_ ‘eternal accidents’. _Any_ immortal mistakes.” He leaned in, over the table, staring deep into Louis’ drawn face with an inhuman brightness in his eyes: and his questions had no question in them, only the hunger of knowing.

“Does anyone ever really stumble into eternity? There are so many of us who did not ask for it. And yet,” he smiled, “if all your tall tales come together to tell at least one truth, _you did_.

“Did you dream of him, Louis,” he murmured tenderly, “your _‘Prince’_? Did you lie in bed awake, awaiting whatever beast might come? _Did you leave the window open?_ ”

“Did Benedict?” asked Louis softly, meeting his gaze. 

Rhosh’s face went blank as a Greek relief, features dropping into something more stone than flesh. If Louis were human it would make his skin crawl. Even now he struggled against the flight instinct that made all the downy hair on his body stand on-end. In moments like these, Louis could almost see why Lestat called his stubborn defiance against ease a desire for death. 

“Is that not why I am really here?” he continued, slowly, tone more soft commiseration than accusation. “An eye for an eye, Rhoshamandes? A favorite for a favorite. All his loves in exchange for the one life of yours.”

“You do know,” replied Rhosh curtly “that you are nothing to me. That I have no use for you unless I make one.”

“Absolutely,” Louis affirmed quietly. ‘“I am the nothing to your everything. But we didn’t _take his life_ , Rhosh.” A consoling confidence had crept, without permission, into his voice. “His decisions were his own.” 

His tone became a little firmer as he remembered Benedict on that day, with his dais, and those hard lines set bitterly in his determined angel’s face.

“Benedict died by his own hand; his own choice. Who were we to make it for him? Believe me when I say that no-one wanted it for him. He was _much beloved_. But he was a thousand years old, and none of us has the authority to overrule such a decision. We owed him that much.” Louis’ mouth tightened. “As his friends. We owed him his choice.”

“Ah, but you see, that’s all nonsense,” snapped Rhosh quickly. It seemed that he had actually been listening very intently. “Prattling on about the honor of choice when you yourself let Lestat make that _very choice_ for you years ago, and only because of _his choice_ are you sitting with me now.

“In fact,” he continued abruptly, “you have benefited quite well from allowing Lestat for your entire immortal existence to dictate every _choice_ of import for you- even negating your _successful_ attempt on your own pitiful life. It is a wonder that you have the gall to say such things to me when you, personally, are proof of my point; when you only sit here now because of the preference, graciousness, and _choice_ of an asinine Maker who unfathomably seems to prefer his playthings broken.”

Some words have the quality of blows. These were delivered with the snap of a good slap.

All at once it rushed over Louis like a crashing wave: all those things he had not wanted to feel when he had looked, back in the parlor, into the eyes of the painted Benedict. It was that painful, intimate understanding of this situation, of both of these men, that terrible knowledge of them-through-himself; and the true knowledge of himself which was that, from the very first night Benedict had come to Trinity Gate for Rhosh, bedraggled, sadeyed and defeated, Louis had hated him. 

Not, of course, that he had been well-liked after Maharet and Mekare’s death- Louis could see the distrust, the disdain in the eyes of the Coven for a boy who could only be cast as villain or victim. But Louis’ dislike had nothing to do with _trust_ , that foregone conclusion. Louis had just hated to _see_ him. He had not liked Benedict’s mannerisms, his self-conscious smiles, the way he deferred to anyone. He hadn’t liked the look in his eyes when he talked so charitably about Rhosh, seemingly the last de Landen left who still believed. Louis hadn’t liked _that_ , his infinite belief in Rhoshamandes- Benedict’s sureness, until the end, that one of these nights his Maker would finally come around. Louis had hated that sweet mouth, made for making excuses. 

He had just hated to see him around the Court. He had never wanted to meet Benedict’s gaze. In his guileless seaswept eyes was a receptivity- as if every word could still be the word of God; that terrible, transcendental youth, which for Louis was still the reminder of too many emptinesses he had known. And he did not like the way Benedict looked _at him_ , like there was some intimacy shared between them which was an understanding of each others’ eternity. His presence had been like constantly having to pass an old portrait in the hall- a self-image which, once familiar, was now unendurable in its poor simulacrum. 

They had never even properly spoken. Louis had been reluctant to engage with the madness of yet-another would-have-been St. Francis. He had tried, of course, but Louis had assured himself that Benedict wanted to talk to _everyone_ at the Court- given the opportunity, he seemed a social butterfly. Louis was beginning to see that _opportunity_ was the operative part of that equation. 

It was how, to Louis’ distaste, Lestat had lured Benedict into his boudoir: those long, intimate talks, lasting hours, from which Lestat had extracted all the juicy details about Rhoshamandes that could be mythicized into memoir. 

Eyeing the lovingly Scotch-taped spine of _Interview with the Vampire_ , Louis contended with the sick guilt which had begun to build in his stomach. _They had never spoken more than ten words to each other._ And though it had gnawed at him when Benedict showed up that night with his dais and his dying wish, he had done nothing. He had not even moved to say something to Benedict then, when it was too late. He had simply watched him die.

Louis was thinking: _he wanted us all to watch him die. A thousand years and he wanted it to be us._

He had not even given Benedict the last honor of partaking in his Blood. Louis had chalked it up to his own personal revulsion with participating in a showy, public suicide- but he _had_ participated, as much as witness is participation; and Louis had learned, long ago, that witness usually is. 

It had been earlier that very evening, watching Benedict and Armand spat like cherubs filled with holy fire that Louis had abruptly realized how little they had ever spoken- how easily that he and Benedict might have been friends; how he, Louis, had simply not wanted to be the handler of a little mystic, his brother’s keeper all over again. 

And how bitterly Louis always disappointed himself. 

Louis realized Rhosh was staring right through him. He might as well be thinking out loud. 

Rhoshamandes’ brow had darkened to a glower, all politeness fallen away- and with it, any illusion of choice Louis had in their current situation. 

“You know,” he intoned in a flat, low voice that dripped with poison; with pain; with the kind of hurt that would immolate the whole wide world. “You _all know_ what you have done. You have stolen from me the only thing that mattered; you had stolen it before he was even gone, and you mock me with the illusion of honor when you know you have taken my life.”

“We took _nothing_ from you,” Louis shot back, “there was nothing to _take_ -”

“You have _murdered_ me!” The impact of Rhoshamandes’ fist upon the little wooden table between them threw the half-drunk bottle of wine to the floor- shattered the glass- splintered the wood into a thousand pieces and had Louis cringing into his chair in terror, veins on fire with fear. A cold sweat dripped down the back of his neck, breath shaking as he watched with learned vigilance the monster who suddenly appeared before him. 

“You have murdered me,” Rhosh repeated, wildeyed, raking his long mane back from his face as he stood. “You have killed him and taken the _only life I have_. Do you _understand_?” He shot his glare to Louis and it seemed suddenly he was in agony. Louis could not breathe.

“You _poisoned_ him,” Rhoshamandes hissed, kicking aside his enormous armchair with ease and stalking out of the circle behind Louis, who recoiled uselessly into his seat. “You told him _this was possible_ and then you say it was his choice! _Who gave him that choice_!” 

Rhosh turned sharply towards the bookcase, his back to Louis, and was suddenly overcome; he slammed his forearm in a sudden arc along the shelf, showering book-dust into the air and disintegrating the paltry remainder of its contents. Then his shoulders and torso tensed together, overwhelmed by the futility of the gesture. Suddenly he turned to face Louis again with a vicious and frightening intensity in his expression.

“You poisoned him,” he repeated, slow and low with a voice like inferno. “ _You poisoned us_. You had defiled him with your _idylls_ ; you let your philosophy fester in him; you _gave him the freedom to die_. What you call _choice_ is a disease of the self from which blood-drinkers must be saved,” his terrible voice shook, “and there is no more potent proof than yourself- spending an eternity being saved from your own hands! Stolen from a death,” he sneered, scoffing, “to which you willingly submitted, by a man whose embraces you submit to even now.

Tell me, Louis,” Rhosh snarled, not a shred of amicability left in him, “ _Beloved consort._ Tell me how much your _beloved Prince_ loves you, that he would not even give you that _very_ _choice_ of which you opine so highly. If this is what he values, _tell me how he loves you and will not let you die-_ or I will know that your _choice_ is a consolation you give to those whose deaths you _do not care_ to stop. I do not understand,” he choked. 

Louis realized his eyes had welled red; that Rhoshamandes held his head imperiously high and stared Louis down with the fire of an ancient angry god and did not cry. 

“I do not understand,” he repeated through gritted teeth, “why _you!_ Why _you_ _live_ and he does not.” His powerful voice twisted like an ugly, thrashing tide. “Why you would tell him that he _could be_ on his own, and be surprised that in this ‘liberation’ _you had murdered us both_.”

Rhosh took an uneven step backwards and sunk heavily into his chair, seeming to force himself to sit. The knuckles of his shaking hands, clutching the oaken arms of the seat, shone white as bone. 

He lifted his head and looked down at Louis, composed of pride and power, grief and rage written through every line of his face. 

“But I do understand,” he muttered, low and strained. His stare burned straight through Louis’ riveted body and into the back of his chair. “I do. You are _his_. You have stolen my heart, and pretend that you have done me no injury; that I had no heart, and so there was no crime. And you are _his_. And Lestat’s vanity would not let him live without possession of his heart.”

He drew back into his seat and looked away suddenly, grimacing as if he could not bear to see Louis any more. He leaned heavily on the arm of his chair, face angled so that Louis could see very little of his expression- that abject pain- through the long curtain of his blonde hair. 

“You are all so young yet!” Rhoshamandes laughed, bitter, darkest of humors shot through with the strain of suffering. “Fledglings led by a fledgling fool, and old fools led by a fledgling. Children chattering about _eternity_.” One blue eye shone cold, watching Louis from the long shadows cast across his face. “You have fueled his fire long enough. It is time he learned to burn on nothing.”

He seemed to gather all the strength in his body for the effort of lifting his head upon his neck. From beneath the deep grief of his brow he stared dully into Louis’ eyes.

“You spoke so eloquently of detachment, Louis,” he slowly said, voice rough with hurt; and he breathed a little lost laugh. “It is time _he_ understood what it is to be detached. Life is so _long_ when one is lonely. Don’t you think? It is time he be taught what eternity _is_.” 

Louis’ body had tensed to the point of fight-or-flight. But he was very aware that the only true option was flight. Had Rhoshamandes moved too quickly he might have bounded out of his seat. Instead, Rhosh sat back slowly in his chair and he looked off- his perfect profile haloed in the dying light- and was still.

Louis had not realized, in his terror, that the hearth was burning very low. The flames had suffocated, begun to smolder. Rhoshamandes was as motionless as a statue. Louis watched the light upon the planes of his features slowly twist and fade; watched the light in his eyes slowly, slowly go out. 

And when his gaze came around to look upon Louis again it was as dead as a bygone era. There were just the last flickers of grief in his expression, and then Louis watched them flicker, and be gone. He was stone, or steel. He was that unharmable, eternal thing which most blood-drinkers never become. 

“I am at peace,” Rhosh murmured into the darkening room, “with what I must do. I think that perhaps I have been at peace a long time, and I was only still too alive to know it.” Only the pupils moved in his still face; the soft, almost-imperceptible murmur of his lips. “Five-thousand years,” he breathed, “of death. Five-thousand years and it has finally taken.”

He sighed, deeply. “Finally,” he exhaled, “there is nothing left to love. Finally I care for nothing at all.”

Rhoshamandes turned with his too-smooth movements to look at Louis directly; and he sat up very straight and tall. “How beautiful you must be to him,” he said, no emotion in his voice but weariness. Louis’ chest was a vice. “That all you value is beauty and feeling. How splendid your tender suffering must be for the both of you. Since you are the host of his human heart, I wonder which one of you shall hurt more when I take you.”

The moment was like the slow shriek of a bow being drawn across the too-tight strings of a violin, just an ugly sound stretching, and stretching, and stretching, a warbling wail that pitched and pitched until all reality was warped around the pain of its scream.

“Louis,” Rhosh murmured, voice low and flat. The name rolled off his tongue like a stone and hit the floor hard. “Does it help to know,” he asked, “that this is not personal at all?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Louis' two quotations in this chapter draw from French philosopher Paul Valéry ('the nothingness shows through') and Hannah Aizenman's poem 'Notes Toward an Elegy', which played an integral role in the writing of this fic.


	3. -"I own you."

**III.** “No,” said Louis, breathless, truthful and terrified. “My God. You’re mad.”

Rhoshamandes laughed with his whole chest and no humor at all. “Am I? You think so? Fledgling, you have not lived long enough to know what madness _is_.” Gripping the arm of his seat, he tensed his thighs and began, slowly, to rise. 

And Louis had the most useless bodily reaction possible: he drew his legs up and recoiled deep into the seat of his chair. His muscles had grown leaden, waterlogged with fear, and he could not will himself to move, to stand, to run. Rhoshamandes was too close to him, too _absolute,_ and Louis was the deer frozen before the hungry wolf. He might as well have bared his throat. 

He wanted to disappear; to sink through the stone floor and into the sea. The fire smoldered low, and it seemed that all the feeble light of the room was a limited resource, and that all the remaining glow was spent casting a golden radiance across the hard line of Rhoshamandes’ jaw. 

“There’s no need to be so skittish, Louis,” he laughed, his voice intimate and cold. “Knowing how you struggle to make decisions for yourself, I have given you a simple choice. You could make this very easy for both of us.”

Louis’ breath was caught in his throat. His eyes flickered behind Rhoshamandes, to the corpse in the seat opposite. The old man’s face had begun to take on the unworldy wax-figure grace of early rigor mortis.

And he saw beyond the corpse something he had not seen before, something which was only illuminated by the hypervigilance of terror. It was- directly behind Rhosh, set into the darkest corner of the round library and shadowed by ruined shelves- a small, Gothic arch, enclosing a closed door. 

Louis felt the heavy weight of a stony palm on his shoulder before he realized Rhosh was standing over him and his eyes flicked up involuntarily. It was not that he was a very old, powerful blood-drinker which overwhelmed Louis now: it was that he was _a very frightening man_. How tall, how broad; how large the hand that fit, possessive, into the curve between Louis’ throat and shoulder. Louis did not want to see him. He tried to stare straight ahead, to rest his gaze in the flesh-folds of the dead caretaker’s face, and with the magical-thinking of sheer desperation willed this _not to be happening_ as he felt that cold palm run heavily up the column of his neck. 

His breath was shaky, uneven, coming too-quickly, now, as Rhoshamandes traced the high line of Louis’ cheekbone with a thumbpad smooth as a stone tumbled by millennia of water. The useless thought occurred to Louis that the difference in physical size between them was great enough that even if they’d both been simply mortal men, he still wouldn’t have stood a chance. 

The library had grown dark. His body knowing well what it was to be _caught_ , Louis’ frozen nerves offered him up before that higher power. He felt the heat of Rhoshamandes’ gaze upon him, melting, softening his body like wax.

Louis _forced_ himself to look up. He saw the last light of the room in those blue irises. And then he saw it die. Rhosh studied the trapped terror in Louis’ face and decided, with a predator’s detachment, that it must be enough.

Like a too-taut string mid-concerto the moment snapped. Louis threw his chair back with all the weight in his body and sent reality toppling. As he hit the floor he rolled and the world warped into a shriek of color and sound and movement, scrabbling to his feet, running before his heels were on the ground, leaping for his break- towards that door directly behind Rhoshamandes _, which had to be the exit._ In the uneven stagger of unrelenting terror Louis threw himself forward, hyperspeed-stumbling over piles of books, sliding on slick slips of pages until he was inches before the archway, his hand laying on the handle and the gamble paid off: the door was unlocked. 

Split-second relief poured over Louis as he ripped it open and flung himself into the room beyond, hurled to the carpet by his own momentum. Suddenly a glorious flood of warm light surrounded him, and Louis head spun as he desperately propelled himself forward across the salmon carpet. But he’d guessed wrong. This was no exit: this brightly lit room, whose four-poster loomed before him with rose-colored drapes, was _Benedict’s bedchamber._ He was in Benedict’s bedchamber and the sheer strength of Rhosh’s hand was holding him in place from behind as the flat of his palm suddenly muffled Louis’ screaming mouth.

Fear exploded into a burst of futile thrashing and muffled noise as Rhoshamandes pulled Louis up, to his feet- past his feet, so his toes scraped the ground- and held his back flush against his chest. Louis swung his hips wildly to one side and they were on the floor, suddenly, rolling, kicking legs making contact with absolutely anything and Rhosh’s arm an iron bar across his stomach. He struggled madly against the impossible grip, hissing and writhing even as he knew that he might as well be fighting a hurricane: there was no escape. 

Rhosh’s other hand came down and clapped over his mouth again hard as he got a firm arm around Louis’ chest. He tried to stand and Louis, hips dangling, jerked his body-weight again to the side and unbalanced them both. He immediately regretted it. They tumbled, again, but this time the side of Louis’ face was pressed hard into the pink carpet, and he was on his back, and Rhoshamandes was on top of him. 

The enormous palm pinned his jaw to the floor and forced Louis’ mouth open with the pressure atop it. He was hyperventilating, and he felt his unmetabolized breath made hot against the slick inside of Rhosh’s palm as Rhosh worked three thick fingers roughly into the back of his mouth.

“There is no need for such a show,” he was saying, with a detached brusqueness. Louis gagged, that stupid human reflex, as Rhoshamandes hooked middle and forefinger into the back of his cheek. “Who are you _even yelling for_?” Louis was drooling heavily around the thick digits pressing behind his molars, green eyes wild and rolling, stuck antelope in the jaws of a lion. Rhosh pressed his jaw against the floor _hard,_ so that he felt the stone beneath the carpet. Louis felt an arm working its way around his torso again, lifting him by the curve of his back; and then, before he could make another thrashing attempt at freedom, he was slammed back against the stone wall of the chamber hard enough to bruise. The strength which pressed him to the rock was impossible to escape. 

“Really,” Rhosh drawled. He was pinning Louis’ hips to the stone with the immense weight of his own. Behind him Louis saw the room on whose threshold they grappled lit up like an arsonist’s wedding, a thousand candles dripping wax over every perfect surface. The wild light seemed to pitch the oranges and dollhouse-pinks of the bedroom into lurid hysteria. “You only make it more difficult for _both of us_. _I_ would have greatly preferred the other option; only by your own _choice_ are you struggling.”

The hard seams of him dug into Louis’ flexible body, weight of the bigger man crushing his ribs. Never before had Louis experienced quite the same sensation of his own bones _bending_. 

Rhosh's breath was wet but cool on Louis’ neck. “If you cooperate,” he murmured, proximity to Louis’ ear running gooseflesh over his whole body, “we shall both enjoy our evening more. If you promise to come peacefully, you could go free; and since you are going to come nevertheless, I should think this an easy choice.”

It had not occurred to Louis, until this moment, how easy it would be for Rhoshamandes to hurt him so badly he would not be able to fight back at all. The realization of his true helplessness swept over him: the sudden horrible understanding that if he struggled too hard against the stoneweight of this man’s body, he’d be more likely to shatter his hip than escape. He did not know what would happen to him if he were to be completely incapacitated. A thousand nightmares flickered across the inside of his eyes. 

He was pinned between the rock wall and a harder place with Rhosh’s chest flush to his, scratchy bearded face burying itself in the warmth of his neck. “I will take my hand off your face,” Rhosh growled, “if you cease to insult me by _screaming._ There is no one to perform for but me; and you would be wise to play the role I would like you to perform.” 

And then he chuckled flatly against Louis’ throat. “You really ought to keep your head,” he breathed; “If you relax, you will certainly enjoy yourself.”

Louis stiffened and then, by great concentrated effort, began to untense. 

The pressure of the palm was removed from his aching jaw, and Rhoshamandes’ two fingers from his mouth; Louis felt the slick pull of his lower lip. Rhosh leaned back and wiped the spitwet knuckles across his neck. Slowly Louis turned to see him; and in the warptime of horror, it seemed his vision turned slower than his sight. He saw nothing in Rhoshamandes’ expression but a bitter amusement. 

Louis’ burning gaze met Rhosh’s and he stared steadily into those blue eyes. For a moment they held it. Then he used his wet mouth and spat hard into Rhoshamandes’ face.

Rhosh blinked slowly. It seemed as if every torch in this apartment, every lit candle had been brought to this salmon-velvet bedroom, all the light in Saint Rayne blazing at once for one shining spectacle of violence.

Rhoshamandes grabbed Louis’ face and kissed him brutally, fang and the borrowed heat of the dead man in his breath. His beard scratched steel wool against Louis’ throat. Louis could not close his lips or struggle away as tongue forced past teeth, into his mouth, and so he did the only thing he could: bite down. 

And _immediately regret it_. Louis tried not to inhale as the taste of Rhoshamandes’ blood flooded his sinuses- and every nerve in his body was suddenly alert and humming to it; as if his veins strained through his skin. He tried desperately not to taste, not to _swallow_ , not to succumb to the dizziness before swoon- but it was impossible. Pressed to the wall by the crush of his lips, Louis felt Rhosh drip slow and viscous down the back of his throat. 

He was wide-eyed, breathing quickly through his nose, and Rhosh had a hand wound tightly in Louis’ grown-out hair and was laughing against his mouth. Louis’ muscles had gone limp. It was his own starved-animal urges that overwhelmed him; Louis heard himself whimper against Rhosh’s lips from the sheer exertion of the denial.

A string of spit and blood broke the seal of their mouths. Louis’ head lolled on his neck, a mouthful of red spilling over his lower lip to stain the white-silk lapels of his robe. Louis’ veins hummed and sparked with new knowledge of the taste of his blood, and begged for it; and when Rhoshamandes kissed him again, this time there was no choice but yielding. The razor edge of incisors nicked his lips, slit his tongue. He squirmed as Rhosh held him there, taking his time, his fingers forcing Louis’ jaw open by the joints so that the presence of his tongue seemed even more the violation.

Hair flowed around Louis’ face, a sea of gold. He was drowning. Like lipstick-acid eating at the soft marble of a timeworn statue, it seemed every kiss eroded him, every caress wore him away; it seemed Rhosh might as well be kissing anyone at all. 

When he parted their lips again he held Louis’ jaw open firmly and spit hard on Louis’ tongue to clear his palate. Though it was no more than a hint of him, every empty vein seemed to strain against Louis’ skin and sing for it. 

Louis had bitten the inside of his cheek until it bled; he tried desperately to focus on the familiar taste of his _own_ blood. He did not know when he had begun to cry, only that he could feel the tears, wet and red-smelling, on his cheeks. Rhosh’s lips trailed hungry over the side of his mouth and moved, whispering without words, against the soft skin behind his ear. Suddenly he drew down and licked a long, breathless stripe up Louis’ throat, across his jaw, up his cheek. Louis cringed with disgust as the rough tip of Rhoshamandes’ wet tongue curved up his lacrimal bone and around his open eye. It wasn’t until he pulled back and Louis saw those blue eyes darkened, pupils dilated by lust, that he realized Rhosh had been licking the tears from his face- and he was enjoying the taste of him. 

A flush had bloomed in Rhoshamandes’ cheek. Louis pulled vainly away, face pressing against the cold rock, as Rhosh shoved his mouth back into the crook of his throat. Louis closed his eyes tight, feeling that heated panting against his neck, all restraint and congeniality gone; murmuring in his ear with the monstrous mockery of a lover. 

“I can taste him,” Rhosh sighed with a ragged rumble in his voice. “I can _taste_ him in you. Both Blood of my Blood,” he exhaled, kissing Louis’ throat wetly, “both of you mine.”

His right hand had crept its way under Louis’ turtleneck, cool fingers so long Louis felt sure that Rhosh could wrap two hands around his waist. He unleashed a barrage of hopeless kicks, squirming, but was only crushed more immovably against the wall by Rhoshamandes’ body. Louis clenched his jaw when he felt the sharp tips of fang press against the tendon of his neck.

“ _Nothing_ is yours,” he hissed from a mouth that strained as far away from the predatory hunger of Rhoshamandes’ teeth as his flowerstem neck would allow. “You have _nothing_. You are entitled to no destruction.” He was pressing back as hard as he could against the stone wall, as if in pushing hard enough he would be able to sink inside the rock, hide forever. 

“On the contrary,” Rhosh breathed heavily, lips moving against the fast-fluttering pulse in Louis’ throat, “Lestat begat you, and Magnus, Lestat; and I, the kindly one against whom Magnus sinned in making himself.” 

Louis had pressed his cheek to the rock, turning his face as far from Rhosh as it could be turned. One of his hands ran up Louis’ ribs, flatpalmed and cold and greedy for touch. He wound a handful of grown-out, inky hair around his other fist and jerked Louis’ head back sharply, exposing the unbroken expanse of his neck; throat full of unconscious animal snarls as he inhaled, heavily and hungrily, the smell of blood from beneath Louis’ thin skin.

“You are the runt of my line, Blood of my Blood,” Rhosh growled, and it was that low, bestial register of powerful vampires that raised all the hair on Louis’ body as faithfully as it always did when he heard it in Lestat’s voice. “You are the _product of me_. Flower of my spreaded seed. You have _always_ been mine; _I am already inside you.”_

Louis could not draw back, could put no distance between those needlesharp points and the easy puncturing of this throat. As he felt Rhosh’s jaw tense against his skin, Louis surrendered finally to the impulsivity of desperation. He wrenched his chin up, paused, and, with all the strength in his body, lurched _forward_ to knock Rhosh squarely in the middle of the skull with the hardest part of his forehead.

His perception went crash-white.

There was an overwhelmingly loud ringing, like someone had fired off a shot next to his ear. He didn’t feel himself fall; only when sense and vision flowed back into him did he realize he was slumped on the floor. The clashing patterns of the overlapping carpets swam, a discordant concert of color whose bass was the roaring rhythm of pain in Louis’ head. 

He blinked rapidly, willing his sight to clear. The room was both excruciatingly bright and too-dim. Blood roared in his ears and drowned out any other sound. He could see Rhoshamandes’ black boots, the polished vamp and toecaps, before him. Louis’ lagging vision followed the line of his leg to see him less than three feet away, clutching at his head. Though the world spun and vertigo overcame him when he pulled himself by the doorframe to his feet, Louis forced his body to the opportunity and staggered at top-speed into the library.

Something was terribly wrong with his vision: it seemed like God was flickering the stage-lights of the universe. Every color slid from brilliant to washed, and the floor seemed to shift under his feet. Hand to his forehead, wet with blood, Louis lurched past the corpse of the old man and stumbled over the remains of his broken chair- made it through the library- and blundered into the sitting room.

He was thinking very fast and yet thinking nothing at all, blood running down over his palm, every sound a scream in his ears. As he knocked clumsily past the chairs and the long sofa and grabbed the doorframe which led into the parlor, Louis realized vaguely, through the deluge, that he had probably concussed himself as thoroughly as if he had hit his head against any other stone wall. 

He careened into the parlor, desperately wheeling- looking for an exit- _somewhere_ in this goddamn apartment there had to be an _exit_. The bells in his skull, with the urgency of an alarm-clock, had not stopped ringing, and the room was a bog of swimming shadows in Louis’ addled vision, darker than dark. He felt blood drip down his face and pressed his palm harder to his forehead as he spun rapidly, confusedly through the parlor, looking for anything that might conceal a door or an entryway- _anything_. Tiny pieces of broken glass bit into his bare feet and the long trim of the white robe flared around him as he turned, tangling his ankles so that he stumbled and was flung heavily atop the cluttered coffee table. 

At this moment two things happened: Louis, sprawled across the destabilized surface, felt that heavy hand close again on his shoulder; and his own hand, groping blindly, closed on the blunt end of the rusted poker which he had so errantly knocked to the base of the hearth not a half-hour before. He felt himself pulled up roughly by the shoulder and jerked into a stand, felt the weight of the poker follow his hand; and as Rhoshamandes spun him around, Louis put all the momentum of his body into his left shoulder and swung the sharp end of the iron with him.

There was a sickening CRACK as, to Louis’s surprise, metal connected with five-thousand-year-old flesh. The hand on his shoulder let go. 

Rhoshamandes had staggered backwards, clutching his jaw with a wild fury in his blue eyes; and in Louis’ hands hummed some old muscle-memory, dragged up from the dark depths of history, of another fine blow he’d dealt long ago and how its connection had been filled with some ancient satisfaction. But it had been merely the luck of speed and surprise which had caught Rhosh off-guard: and for a moment he stood there with his hand pressed to his face, staring at Louis in dull shock.

Louis, as shocked as he, stared back. There was a smear of blood matting the blonde hair at Rhosh’s temple, a rapidly-healing bruise. Louis realized abruptly that Rhosh was actually holding his jaw in place. His good fortune had broken it- now it was healing rapidly, and Rhosh had only the moment to make sure it correctly set. When he removed his palm Louis saw an ugly gash marring the gold of his beard, dripping blood throughout, and Louis’ disorientation pitched again into terror as he watched the slow hardening of Rhoshamandes’ eyes into hatred. 

As Louis took a step back into the coffee table Rhosh lurched forward, and in the moment that Louis raised the poker up again that big hand grabbed his wrist and wrenched it around painfully. Louis yelled as he felt the bone bend in the wrong direction. The iron clattered to the floor, and he was yanked forward; and suddenly, there was the long span of fingers wrapping around his throat, holding him in place with a tight, bracing squeeze around the thin column of his neck. This strangling support kept Louis from being entirely thrown to the floor when the force of a full-shoulder slap connected across his face.

For a moment everything was red film and the sick crunch of cartilage echoing through his skull. Louis tasted his own blood running over his lips. His knees had buckled beneath him, and all that held him upright was that hand around his throat, squeezing and squeezing; and then there was a second wrapping around the first, and that was squeezing as well. With both thumbs pressed to Louis’ windpipe Rhosh forced him back several steps, Louis’ feet dragging limply across the floor until Rhosh bore him down on his back, atop the broken coffee table, and went down with him. 

Rhosh’s weight pressed Louis down into the cracked wood, splinters and magazines digging into his back and fingers digging into his throat until Louis’ already-addled vision became a blur of color, his perception nothing but a hazy world of pain. Rhosh throttled him like he meant to strangle; but since Louis did not need to breathe it was merely excruciating. His senses swam. He heard Rhosh snarling, inaudible, yet so close that Louis felt the wetness of breath on his cheek. Briefly he had the distinct thought- through his body’s inexhaustible panic- that Rhosh might break his neck, and in the moment it seemed as if that would be a relief. 

“Do you intend to humiliate yourself any further?” He was barking loudly into Louis’ face as Louis’ head, limp on the stem of his neck, lolled in his grip. “Are you too _simple_ to know when to submit? I cannot _imagine_ ,” and here he lifted Louis’ head from the surface of the table, by the throat, and slammed him painfully back down again, “that Lestat deigns to play this game with you _every time_.”

He let go, suddenly; and Louis’ drooping, lidded eyes shot open as vision and sense and hearing flooded him again. One cannot strangle a blood-drinker to _death_. But it is perfectly possible to strangle one into surrender. 

He was yanked up, abruptly, by the roots of his hair until he was unsteadily upon his feet. His sight still swam; he knew that if Rhosh let go his knees would buckle under him again. His other hand wrapped suddenly around Louis’ face, blinding him, grinding down painfully against his broken nose with the center of his palm, and holding him by the temples Rhoshamandes shoved Louis’s back hard against the stone wall. 

The anger of his voice was distinct in Louis’ ear. “Or does he prefer this game?” He snarled, blood in his breath hot on Louis’ face. Rhosh crushed his head back into the wall, and Louis whimpered from the agony of the weight on his broken nose. “Are you used to playing too-foolish to escape? Does he always catch you? _Do you enjoy to lose?_ ”

Louis wanted to squirm; to struggle, to fling himself to the right or left; but he had been too rattled, and his body was crushed punishingly against the rock wall of the parlor. The palm which blacked out his vision forced his head back with a firm and long-fingered grip. Then Rhosh stepped back and Louis was held in place only by the pressure of that hand; and the temporary relief of this turned quickly into panic as Rhoshamandes extended his arm entirely and began, with ease, to lift. Louis’ body responded with a burst of pure adrenaline, kicking furiously as he realized what was happening.

The agony of the grip on his face became unbearable; the fingers on Louis’ temples dug in so hard he saw colors. Rhoshamandes’ elbow extended fully, pressing him into the stone, and Louis’ toes scrabbled desperately for purchase as he felt his feet leave the ground. The pain in his skull was so great that Rhosh’s voice washed in-and-out of audibility. 

“I know you have the sense,” he was snapping, a real touch of offence under the rumble of his rage, “to be capable of a pleasant capitulation. I truly do not think you are as stupid as you act. Do not continue,” he drawled, “to _insult me_.”

Louis’ breath was coming in short, panicked bursts. His body dangled limply from the excruciating points of pressure in his head and the joints of his jaw. He heard his bones creak and was suddenly sure that if Rhoshamandes decided to make a fist, his skull would cave to his touch. He could feel his mouth foaming and the spit collecting against the hot inside of Rhosh’s palm, and his jaw was so tightly tensed that it had become its own ache. Agony eclipsed all other feelings. He convulsed under Rhosh’s grip, pointed toes desperate for the floor, and shut his eyes as tightly as he could. 

“Please,” Louis hissed, weakly, and under the muffling of Rhosh’s palm it came out a gasp.

“Please _what_.” 

But Louis could not say anything else. He did not even know what he was begging for. Release? The pain to end? The opportunity to escape- or to surrender? He could not think for the shooting pain in his head, could not will his mouth to move. His wet lips pressed against the center of Rhoshamandes’ hand.

“ _Please_ ,” he strained again, desperation of a sob in his voice. To be suspended in this way was an urgent, unbearable pain even for a vampire, like a hanging which offered neither the possible release of strangulation nor the promised mercy of a broken neck.

Rhosh seemed to grip his face even tighter. Louis thought for a moment his jaw might dislocate, or his bones would crack; then relief rushed through him as the fingers loosened and his limp body slid down the wall, hitting the floor with the heaviness of dead weight. 

He gasped frantically, as if he needed the breath, and vision rushed over him in a wave. Louis lay in a crumpled heap on the carpet and tried to will his body to get up and run. Through the haze of adrenaline, his mind flickered rapidly through the pros and cons of trying actively to get himself killed before the _real_ torture began. Palm bracing against the rug, he slowly pushed himself to rise with the strength of a single shoulder. His head lolled towards the floor, skull still pulsing with the imprint of pain. Curls of dark hair dangled in his vision and Louis silently cursed the romanticism of letting his hair grow as long as Lestat liked it.

Everything was agony and disorientation and horror, so that when Louis felt a light, gentle touch on the crown of his skull, it was almost a comfort. Long fingers carded tenderly through his dark hair, tips massaging into his scalp. It was such a pleasant, soothing contrast to the pounding ache in his skull that his eyes fluttered closed. For an insane moment Louis wanted to lean into the touch.

A stray curl was tucked behind his ear, knuckles brushed against his cheek. He heard Rhosh’s voice, closer than he imagined, dropped low and sonorous; suddenly so drained of his previous anger that it seemed almost sad. 

“I know,” said Rhoshamandes, hardness in his voice measured with that strange, empty sorrow, “that you feel you must be brave. But you wound yourself meaninglessly. No misplaced courage could convince me to kill you.”

Louis opened his eyes slowly, and in his hazy vision he found Rhoshamandes’ shining boot, his knee, and followed the long line of his leg up. Rhosh was bent, his hand in Louis’ hair. He sunk into Louis’ line of sight, coming down on one knee before him. His gaze was an unreadable mixture of pity and coldness. Both hands came up to cradle Louis’ face and the touch was so gentle, so misplaced and terrible and tender that Louis began, trembling, to sob in earnest. 

The left hand braced itself against Louis’ jaw, and Louis, not knowing what he was doing, pressed his cheek into Rhoshamandes’ palm desperately. Red filmed his hazy vision. Rhosh’s touch slid to his bloody nose, which had healed at what Louis knew was a grotesque angle. Then Rhoshamandes abruptly jerked his right wrist in the wrong direction, brutally resetting the badly-healed bone, and Louis wailed in agony.

“I would hate,” said Rhosh, tone soft and full of cruel amusement, “to ruin your _pretty face._ ” Louis’ yell had broken into wretched jagged sobs, red tears spilling freely. He was outside himself with fear. He opened his eyes through the film and saw, over Rhosh’s shoulder, the too-bright eyes of Benedict’s painted doppelganger presiding over the whole scene with that strange unchanging melancholy. 

Rhosh, now upon both his knees before Louis, pulled back and wound his hand into the crown of Louis’ hair with that same unctuous tenderness. He wove his fingers through Louis’ scalp, twisting the dark locks softly around his knuckles, and then deliberately straightened to his full height and closed his grip. Louis thrashed in a feeble panic as Rhosh began to drag him, by the roots of his hair, across the broken-glass floor of the parlor, through the archway, and into the office. 

The pain in his skull was unbearable. Louis tried to grab the moldings of the doorframe, the bookcases as they passed, anything to impede the journey; but he was pulled struggling and squirming through the office. Over scattered papers and broken statues, over little bits of glass, through the wetness of the shattered vase and the crush of all the dead daisies it had once contained he clawed for purchase. He tried to grip the desk only for his clammy fingers to slide as cleanly off its corner as if it were oiled. He pried weakly at Rhoshamandes’ hand to no avail; he might as well try to bend the marble fingers of a Bernini. Louis knew they were going towards the ruined red bedroom whose door he had, an hour ago, left so-foolishly open; he began to thrash in an earnest panic when he saw, approaching through the archway, the impending horror of the red bed. 

As they came to threshold his hand passed over something sharp on the floor. Louis’ fingers closed on a fine bone-handled letter opener. Desperate, he twisted violently against the hand in his hair and thrust the blade-end as deeply as he could into Rhoshamandes’ calf. Rhosh hissed loudly, knee buckling under him more from shock than pain, and his grip on Louis’ hair loosened. Louis flung himself away, hoping to use the momentary surprise to his advantage; but as he did Rhosh tightened his fingers again, and Louis whined in pain as his body jerked short of its intended freedom. 

Rhoshamandes turned quickly and, as he yanked Louis through the archway and over the threshold of the red bedroom, dealt him a heavy booted blow to the chest. Louis’ sternum cracked in his ears, and he collapsed to his elbows. Rhosh bent to rip the letter opener from his calf, hissing, Louis agonizingly aware of the smell of his blood; and then sharply he thrust that blade through Louis’ left palm and into the floor.

Louis howled. His hand was pinned to the carpet; he tried to pull himself up and wailed in pain. Then suddenly Rhoshamandes jerked him up by the wrist, dislodging knife from floor and flesh from hand, and as the blood poured from Louis’ palm down his forearm in thick rivulets Rhosh bent his ring-finger back and tore the emerald ring from his left hand. 

He grabbed Louis by the hair, tearing a sob from his inchoate throat; and when he threw him to the mattress Louis’ slender body bounced heavily on the springs like a worn-out doll. His chewed nails snagged on the smooth silk of the ochre comforter as he tried to pull himself away, blood smearing across the bed, but it was no use- Rhosh was languid-quick, a man for whom speed is as easy as moving. He yanked Louis back by the ankle and flipped him on his back with virtually no struggle at all, pinning Louis in place with a hand in the center of his bruised sternum; and all the strength in his body was defeated by that pressure. 

The fire, barely smoldering, cast a weak glow about the room so that when Rhoshamandes straightened he seemed caressed at the edges by gold. Standing over Louis and illuminated, he was severe as a Durer, cold carving of his face resplendent in the low light, golden hair flowing like an angel of some other man’s Revelations; no feeling in his expression at all. But those blue eyes burned. Louis stared up at his beauty in the throw of terror. Then, sudden and unprompted he thought: _flames in a skull_ , and almost laughed despite himself. He had never understood what that line described, what it meant about him- now he knew. 

The hand on his chest remained firm. Rhosh leaned over him, studying Louis’ tear-streaked face more closely with an expression between hunger and apathy. Louis turned his head away, trying to bury it in the bed, but the other grabbed his jaw and brutally yanked him back around. Then almost gently he craned Louis’ neck up at the stem to kiss the blood from his skin. Soft lips danced upon Louis cheek and he choked noiselessly on his tears. Rhosh drew back but held him fast, appearing for a moment to do nothing; then Louis realized from the movements of his hips that he was toeing off his boots with his heels.

He was studying Louis’ trembling form closely, taking some interest in it. Rhoshamandes’ eyes roamed over his body more freely than they had in the library, and it seemed, for the first time, as if he were allowing himself to be engrossed. His gaze slid from Louis’ face down his throat, past the collar of his sweater and over the ribs on which he weighted his hand; it moved slowly over the taut drum of Louis’ stomach, exposed by the riding-up of his shirt, and lingered on the thin skin there with some fascination. Louis felt the firm grip of Rhosh’s left hand slot over his hip as it were a handle. He saw those eyes sweep appreciatively over the tight black denim that concealed his thighs; over the long length of his legs. _Enjoying the view_ , Louis realized, recognizing the look with a not-unfamiliar disgust. 

Rhosh had affected a cool impartiality. But as Louis watched _his_ watching, he saw that expression warm subtly; his attention lit, for the first time, with the beginning flickers of lust. 

And a high-tide of pain washed over Louis, a wave of bitter fury. Rage at Rhoshamandes for doing this to him- at his own impotent terror: rage, suddenly, at Benedict, who had died rather than fought. Louis felt a real miserable _contempt_ for that for that stammering, awkward Benedict whom he had known so briefly, who had spent so many years lying under this monster and never even tried to run; who was dead now. Louis, at least, knew that he would have taken a torch to this place years ago. 

Rhosh had finished with his boots. He dragged Louis by the roots of his hair up the length of the bed, throwing him easily into the bower of silk in which he had awoken not an hour ago as Louis sobbed in impotent rage. 

And the rage was full of grief; and the geyser which lay under the surface of Louis boiled up, that deep fury which would immolate him alive if he let it. It was that the ancient helpless anger which encompassed every evil thing Lestat had ever done to him and left Louis now at this: that he had _let this happen_. 

It burned behind Louis’ eyes, in his aching guts and straining heart. That Lestat had been urged to do something about Rhosh and _had not_ \- that he had been, somehow, _his usual self_ , unreliable and capricious- always that mercurial irresponsibility wrapped in a package of bright belief. Louis wanted so terribly to have faith in Lestat’s _belief_ ; to believe in him, and therefore, to believe in something. But _he had let this happen_. Maybe this new Eternity they had embarked on _was_ kinder. But Lestat, it seemed, was always the same. 

The trouble with forever was that the Earth still moved- the great vault of the Heavens still turned. And yet they drifted together, afloat in the lifeboat of their love, in the same dark sea; navigating still by the same meager light of the same long-dead stars towards the same impossible horizon.

Louis realized that he had begun, again, to cry. 

He had an ancient vampire’s immovable weight atop him and those terrible tears running down his face. Rhosh seemed undeterred by anything Louis could say or do; he simply watched with a modicum of interest in his eyes. One heavy hand weighed on Louis’ shoulder and the other slid from sternum down and gripped Louis’ ribs, tracing the curve of his torso and fitting into his slender waist. He pinned Louis by the hip with the firm yet painless strength of a strong man used to restraint.

“You know,” he intoned coldly, looking down at Louis with distaste and an almost imperceptible softening in his tone. “You could still choose the easy way.”

Louis sniffed and turned his tearstained face to the side, pressing it into the silk pillows. They smelled musty- old lace, older sweat. 

“Go to hell,” Louis mumbled into the silk.

Rhosh frowned. He was pinning Louis easily to the mattress, but suddenly he seemed to hesitate.

“You would learn,” he said, and then paused; as if he did not know how to say what he wanted to say. But the unspoken words hung in the air, and Louis grabbed them. Slowly, he turned his head from the pillows, and looked up at Rhoshamandes with a blood-smeared face. His tears had stained the silk a darker shade of red. 

“To love you?” Louis rasped bitterly. “As Benedict did?” He held eye contact with Rhoshamandes and for that moment, they were as locked together by hatred as any blood-drinkers had ever been. Louis snorted a hoarse laugh. “Is that what you want? You _are_ mad.”

He watched in the low light as every touch of what might have been tenderness in Rhosh’s gaze drained away, leaving only the curl of his upper lip.

 _“_ You would learn,” he drawled, low and nasty, as he crawled atop Louis, covering him entirely with his weight. Louis pressed himself back into the mattress as if he could sink into it. “As you _will_ learn, when the fire of your foolish Prince has been long-extinguished and you are left to choose between misery and crawling back to me.”  
Louis turned his face into the sheets again, fleeing sight, as he felt Rhosh press his face into warm crook of his throat. Rhosh was _smelling_ him, inhaling deeply against his skin to breathe the sweet scent of the blood in Louis’s neck. 

“Poor fledgling,” Rhoshamandes crooned. The hum of his ancient voice vibrated across Louis’ skin and raised chills in every limb. Louis felt Rhosh’s cool hand deftly undo the remaining buttons of his shirt, so that the wet air of Saint Rayne crawled along his bare chest and rendered him hyper-aware of every touch. He seemed to be savoring the press of his fangs against Louis’ fastpumping artery. “You have had so many chances at dying. Death himself must prefer the beauty of your suffering.”

Then he slid into Louis’ vein with such clean, practiced skill that there was no pain; no feeling at all until Rhosh was already inside. 

And Louis’ body _betrayed_ him. His muscles slackened and he went limp beneath the other man like an animal playing dead, all the tension of his body liquefying into the hot pleasure that prepared for swoon. Distantly he heard himself gasp, felt his back lift from the sheets and press flush against the hardness of Rhosh’s chest. It seemed suddenly that his entire body existed around the invasion of teeth in his throat. Louis opened his mouth to scream, to say No, to do anything. All that spilled out was a weak moan.

As Rhosh bore down on him Louis felt, against his own ribs, the beat of that powerful heart: how it pounded against Louis’ chest and filled his perception, drowning him in the sound of Rhosh’s desire and erasing the world. When he withdrew Louis choked a far-gone, hopeless sob, fingers tangled in blonde hair, tugging uselessly.

He gasped for breath- his vision swam- the hand that had been clutching Rhosh’s head fell weakly back next to his face. Louis was panting; he knew vaguely that his body was slick with pinkish sweat. The swirling colors of the room were sickly, and Rhoshamandes was laughing like he thought Louis had done something very funny: 

“ ….so undilute,” he was saying with great amusement in his low tones, “such ‘virgin blood,’ and so _eager_ to be tasted. I would have thought he would keep you with nothing in his veins but him. How long has it been to have you this desperate?”

Louis rolled his head to the side and _groaned_. The pillow was cool against his face as he panted, all heat and exertion. 

“Really. I give you an inch,” the old monster continued, voice lilting smugly, “and you seem to want a mile. What, does he keep you just to _look_ at?”

If Louis could sit up he would have hit Rhosh again and cracked his own skull just to feel the satisfaction of impact.

“I think,” Rhosh rumbled with poisonous humor as he paused to taste Louis on his fangs, “that perhaps I was off in the nature of some of my previous estimations. I think perhaps you do not want it because no-one has ever done it _properly_ to you. It is a pity that such beauty has been wasted in the hands of a blunderer.”

The struggle had gone completely from Louis’ limbs. He felt weak and overwarm, coldsweat and goosebumps. His veins strained through conflicting impulse- repulsion, desire, repulsion at the state of desire. In a brief moment of bright lucidity the terror struck Louis of how _easily_ he could reach the point of no return. How _simple_ it would be to dissolve into this man’s hunger; to flow into him and be only that which flowed. 

Rhosh gently took Louis’ jaw in his palm and held him fast when he flinched. Then, with that same mockery of gentleness, he turned Louis’ tearstained face towards him and kissed the red tears from his face with a hungry tongue. Lips whispered against Louis’ cheeks and traveled down behind his ear, caressing the thin skin and trailing over the cord of his neck. When that tongue traced a curve up Louis’ throat to savor the salty taste of him, it elicited a shameful, rattling gasp. Fangs pressed against the soft, again-smooth flesh, as if Rhosh were testing the give of him, laughter a low vibration that skipped like a stone across Louis’ skin.

“Consort to the _Prince_ ,” Rhoshamandes snorted softly, a chuckle in his exhale. Louis heard himself making tiny, involuntary whimpers. “What is it like to be so favored for your weakness?”

No answer formed on Louis’ dry tongue. But then, without warning, Rhosh sank his teeth into his throat again and he didn’t need to think of anything at all. 

Louis inhaled and choked. It seemed those fangs were blocking his breath; even his inarticulate noises gagged. Rhosh had done something wrong, bitten him too deep, and now he was tightening the clamp of his jaw like he wanted to snap Louis’ neck with his teeth and _it was wonderful_. Louis felt the involuntary arch of his back as one of Rhoshamandes’ big arms slid beneath him, crushing Louis’ ribs to his chest. Rhosh’s laughter reverberated through the teeth in his throat and echoed through the halls of him. It was impossible to save himself, impossible to escape the strength of the man who held Louis in the vice of his jaw: and Louis, squirming around the impalement, was rapidly forgetting why he would want to. 

Rhosh slid out of him suddenly and clamped his mouth around the wound, bruising Louis’ throat like a man too-eager to sink his teeth into the flesh of an overripe peach. Louis heard himself moan raggedly. He could _feel_ himself struggling- his hands tangled in that long hair, he _must_ be struggling; but his body was ruled by the drumming pressure that was the pull of life from his throat. He’d become nothing but the overwhelming beat, beat, beat of Rhosh’s heart, beating its way into his chest and drowning out the sound of his own life. It was _so easy_ , sinking into the warm darkness and feeling himself subsumed into the rhythm of him; Louis thought again how simple it would be for his entire life to become nothing but the fulfillment of a man’s desire. How effortless to be nothing else ever again. He was surrendering to swoon, to the strength of him, sinking slowly into the warm velvet weakness of being consumed.

 _You’re dying_ , said a tiny voice in the back of Louis’ head. _Finally_ , said another. _You’re finally_ being murdered and the pleasure of it was overwhelming: he found himself clinging to consciousness only to enjoy its slipping farther away, a guttering candle just begging to be snuffed. He was no longer much of anywhere; then he was somewhere long ago. They were in some secret beflowered place he didn’t want to remember on some hot perfume night, and he was pressed against the damp grass with those fangs in his throat, and that soft golden hair around his face, tender lips under his collar. Lestat had always loved to make him writhe; and it hadn’t ever been hard when Louis had been so eager to die at his hands. They’d christened the master bedroom in the Rue Royale with blood, white sheets stained red like wedding linens and like his bride- Louis had begged him for it. 

And whether you’re begging for sex or suicide, death’s a pleasure- and Louis could feel what was left of his life circling the drain. Distantly he heard himself gasp a sobbing shameful babble around the teeth whose weight was the only anchor to his body that remained. _Please,_ what? Not _please, stop_. One arm crushed Louis close and the other ran a palm smoother than any other blood-drinker’s (than David- than Armand- than Lestat--) up his sweat-slick chest. Fingers slotted between his ribs as if Louis were a splittable rack of meat. Though the pain in his throat was distantly excruciating, the practiced roughness of Rhosh’s mouth carried him through wave after wave of little deaths. Detached from his body in the hot void, Louis absently thought it must be a very large wound; that Rhosh must have ripped his throat wide open and now Louis was merely enjoying the last shivers of orgasm as he bled out in his arms.

When he pulled out it was double the agony of the entry. Louis’ eyes flew open and he saw nothing but white. He felt himself tugging at Rhosh’s hair, desperately trying to pull him close again, and for a moment heard himself babbling something senseless and devotional. Then abruptly his body remembered the old ritual of breathing. Pain flooded Louis’ throat as he choked, gasping frantically for air. His chest convulsed, gasped for breath, and choked- heaved- gasped- choked; gasping- choking- and then Louis realized abruptly that he was gagging on his own blood.

His body spasmed as his senses began to clear. The leftover human reflexes inside him wanted to panic; Louis felt the edges of the wound tingling, seeking to knit back together that which would not mend, and his too-thin blood poured like a river rejoicing at its emancipation. But he was returning to himself. Red soaked the cushions beneath him with every inhale; Louis heard the whistle of his punctured larynx every time he tried to catch his uncatchable breath. 

So he stopped breathing. Louis rolled his head to the side and the room rolled with him. He pressed his face against the pillows and felt damp; he was laying in a pool of his own blood, soaking slowly into the ochre silk. His vision had settled into a weird, feverish glow. The blur of his exsanguinated sight was like peering through a foggy glass, and it gave the whole brutal scene a gauzy, romantic sort of incandesce through the animal stink of death.

A strong set of arms wrapped around his body, folding limbs neatly against torso, scooping him up gently and moving him into a limp sit. Louis curled into the embrace half-consciously, pressing against the other man who, to the coolness of his emptied body, felt impossibly hot and alive. 

Then there was throat-sound near his ear, a clearing. Louis tensed, and felt the arms that held him become a stiffened prison for his body, too weak to struggle.

“Such a waste,” Rhosh murmured, half-absent, and Louis had to resist the urge to start breathing again merely to hyperventilate. He knew suddenly that if he exhaled, he would begin screaming and not be able to stop.

Waves of gold flowed softly over Louis’ vision. Rhoshamandes’ face tucked into the space behind his ear, lips moving over the thin skin like the precursor to a kiss.

“Such a waste,” he repeated, movement of his mouth a caress, a tender breath against that downy hair at the nape of Louis’ neck, “that you are so fragile as to bleed out immediately, when I merely wanted to ruin you for him.”

Like a fever, Louis body was slick with sweat and ice-cold inside. 

“I know you would prefer death,” Rhosh’s voice came intimately; “it must be an indignity to suffer so prettily. I can only imagine that you must sometimes wish he would kill you instead.”

Rhosh’s hand trailed, beneath his shirt and robe, up Louis’ shivering spine. Louis turned his head slowly against the hard heat of the other’s bloodwarm chest and felt the pull of skin where his open throat had begun to poorly heal. 

Rhosh was frowning at him. “You are ruining my shirt,” he said. And then, as his eyes moved in riveted study of Louis’ bloodsoaked body, he murmured: “Well. I suppose I was already going to be rid of it.”

His gaze drifted away; Louis followed it with his eyes. He saw the room that Rhoshamandes saw: a windowless stone chamber wrapped in heavy darkness, shadows clouding the corners of his vision. Ruined set of rosewood furniture, rotten red drapes, personal effects scattered across the floor. Louis realized that he was looking at a small picture-frame mounted above the mantle on the far wall, centered directly between the posts of the bed. It was a rose pressed behind a prison of glass, perfectly preserved at the peak of its bloom. Absently Louis wondered when the flower had lived, when was the time of its prime and preservation. A year ago? A hundred years? A thousand?

“To be rid,” murmured Rhosh very softly, caught in his own thoughts, “of all of these things.”

Then he looked down at Louis and Louis, half-dead in his arms, met his gaze. 

Rhoshamandes’ eyes were thoughtful, pupils dilated from the new heat in his veins. Rhosh was looking, Louis realized dully, not at his face. He was looking with great interest at the struggling torn flesh of Louis’ neck.

“I think it is cruel that he suffers you to live as you are,” he had fixed his eyes upon Louis’ throat and his voice had become soft and distracted. “That you were made for this.”

Rhoshamandes had been sitting against the headboard with Louis curled against him, considering very well the taste of him and the impressions he had received in the blood. Now he shifted, and laid Louis’ limp, bloodstained body back upon the bed. Louis’ head and shoulders sprawled across the bower of pillows, silk robe spread out around him, white lace trim dripping liquidly from the edge of the bed. 

Louis turned his head away and choked a little, feeling a fresh trickle of blood stain the silk. With nauseating gentleness Rhosh propped his shoulderblades with cushions, then wrapped an arm around his back to draw him close. His mouth breathed hot against the struggling, barely-airtight tear of flesh at Louis’ throat, voice again that low hungry rumble. 

“I know,” Rhoshamandes mumbled low against unhealed skin and straining muscle, “that you would rather die than be desecrated. But I intend only the kindness of spoiling you for him.” 

Louis tensed, waiting for the sting of fang again in that already-ravaged vein. But the pain did not come. Rhoshamandes made a small noise, a throat-sound of disgust; and then his wet tongue covered the unhealed gash on Louis’ throat and Louis groaned, low and deep, back arching hard in pleasure against the press of Rhosh’s chest.

Rhosh had bitten his tongue and Louis felt the blood entering him, wound-to-wound. His brain lit up with need as Rhoshamandes’ tongue traced inside of him, his lips on the gash of him and warm blood in Louis’ open throat dissolving all barriers. Louis was squirming, keening, and Rhosh was saying something low in his ear- or was it in his mind?- low and unintelligible, saying that he knew it was good, of course it felt good, how could it ever be anything else when Louis had been made to do exactly this. Tongue _in_ his throat as he murmured behind the shell of Louis’ ear about how good he tasted- how good he was going _to feel_ \- for which of them he meant, Louis wasn’t sure.

Distantly: disgust and horror and fear and all the proper reactions, and inside him, the blending, the not-quite-becoming of the two of them, drip of Rhoshamandes’ blood directly in his veins healing the hurt, his mouth a poison-kiss. Louis could breathe again; he gasped and heard himself sob suddenly, loudly, once and then again- again- crying from pleasure in his arms as Rhosh nursed the thin edges of Louis’ healing wound with the flat of his tongue.

When he pulled his bruising lips from Louis’ bloody but now-unbroken throat, Louis heard himself groan. He blinked wildly and, his vision somewhat cleared, made dizzy eye- contact. Rhosh was staring down at him, looking vaguely surprised, utterly enraptured, and spellbound- yes- enthralled. His pupils were so dilated there appeared no blue left in his eyes at all. They held each others’ stare. Rhoshamandes’ looked at Louis, supine in his arms and breathlessly rasped: “How much I would like to kill you-” and for the first time in the whole terrible night, Louis heard the husky strain of _true_ desire in his voice. 

Rhosh was studying Louis bloodsoaked body and spread-out hair with flat black eyes. It seemed he had to force himself to look away. His fingers curled limply around Louis’ inner thigh; but he turned his gaze towards the hearth. Louis watched the grate as the sparks which had suffocated began slowly to expand again, to burst into life and make tiny individual fires. The damp wood began once more to take flame and slowly light began to grow from the gloom. It seemed as if every dead wick, every melted hunk of wax found its flare again- the hearth, the torches, the candelabra- until the stone room was illuminated all around with a flickering glow of gold. 

Rhoshamandes looked into the hearth for a long time as the flames spread; and so did Louis. Or perhaps it was only a few minutes. Finally Louis felt that gaze on him again. Slowly he looked up at Rhosh, and saw that Rhosh had been looking at him. He was flushed handsomely with Louis’ blood, and in the low light he looked magnificent and terrible. 

“I think I understand better, now, ” he hummed, low and rough, “the fascination he holds for you.”

The fire crackled, and the hand which had found its rest on Louis’ inner thigh curled into a loose fist and brushed the seam of his jeans lightly with his knuckles. The other ran three fingers through Louis’ hair, gently working at a tangle.

“You are so mortal,” Rhoshamandes continued, musing, “yet not; so…” and here he took his hand from between Louis’ legs and reached up to brush his deathpale cheek with flushed, warm fingers. Louis flinched and felt those fingers harden into a grip on his jaw, the other hand growing tight in his hair. “So _soft_. You bend without breaking. It is indeed beguiling that one can simply do whatever he wants with you.”

Louis opened his mouth weakly. But before he could speak Rhosh gave him a very decisive, stern look and abruptly addressed his thoughts.

“I shall not kill you,” he said. “I have told you as much, and I intend to keep my word. Though,” he added, a hint of of pleasure in his voice, “the beauty of your begging is such that even I find it difficult to deny you”

His eyes moved downwards in thought; and Rhoshamandes turned his face just so. A shadow fell across his expression, and Louis could not see his eyes. But he heard again the lilt of a smile in that empty voice.

“I,” said Rhosh, “shall make you live. And all your life shall be to me an act of worship.”

Louis stiffened. Rhoshamandes sighed, a languid, pleased sigh, as if he was indulging in the anticipation.

“You will spend every heartbeat knowing that you live only because of me,” he exhaled, “that it is my blood which flows inside you and makes you whole.” Rhoshamandes turned to him and looked, with a cold smile of reverie, into the terror of Louis’ eyes as if he were allowing himself to feel the fear and savor it. 

Then he raised his right hand. Louis flinched; but it traveled past him, and the fire of panic flared again as he watched Rhosh, without breaking eye-contact, bring the wrist which bore the broken Rolex to his lips and bite down. 

Every muscle and reflex in Louis’ poorly-built body howled a chorus of terror whose singular command was _run away run away run away_. He grasped and scrabbled for purchase on the bed, backing his weakened body against the headboard, trying to roll off the mattress in either direction and failing to flee: Rhosh’s left hand came easily around his throat and pressed him firmly down against the sheets. His body became hysterical with the too-recent memory of choking, for Louis was sure Rhosh could, and might- even accidentally- crush his vocal chords. But he was defeated by that single firm press. There was simply not enough blood in his brain nor his body to properly struggle. Louis’ stomach lurched when the unmistakable richness of Rhosh’s blood hit the air. When he pulled the wrist from his his lips they were wet and red, and Louis’ every vein strained towards his own ruination.

“I could not imagine,” sneered Rhoshamandes, moving him easily by the throat against the headboard, “making the choice to spend eternity as the tender convalescent.” The reek of his blood was so strong, so old and heady that inhaling felt like choking. The nearness of it dizzied Louis and disoriented him past confusion. Rhosh was backing Louis against the headboard as he crawled atop him, covering him entirely. 

“How you will _ache_ for me,” he sighed, breath heavy and heated with Louis’ blood, “when he is dead. You shall pray that I return to make use of you when the well-tended garden of your weakness becomes obsolete.”

Louis face was flushed hot; his pulse was in his throat. The smell of Rhoshamandes’ blood was too powerful, and his body too empty. He knew what Rhosh saw- his blown pupils, the way the hunger strained against his skin; and he was revolted. The desire to escape _his body_ overwhelmed him entirely. He wailed uselessly as Rhosh yanked his head back by a handful of dark hair.

A thick droplet of Rhoshamandes’ own blood dripped from his lower lip. He had bitten his own wrist deep and stained his mouth red with himself. “I have greatly enjoyed,” he rumbled, “your wanton _desire_ for death. You beg beautifully, Louis.” He wished to never hear his name in this tone, from this mouth, ever again. “But now, I would like to see you weep. 

Weep for me,” he crooned, deceptively soft, as he brought his wrist to Louis’ mouth, “as I know you weep for him. I see what he means, now, when he writes of how suffering becomes you; you wear misery like the wrap of a woman bare beneath her furs.”

The suffocating smell of blood filled Louis’ nose. Struggling with stubborn insistence against every instinct in his body, he pressed his lips closed against the invasion and grit his teeth so hard it felt like they would crack. Behind them he felt the eager, frantic salivation of a mouth which desperately wanted what was being forced upon it. Thick, glittering blood ran over his closed lips, down his chin, and the tears came again, finally, from the sheer exertion of the denial. 

His body and brain were on fire. Louis’ eyes were closed as tightly as it was possible to close them. He heard Rhosh growl raggedly with annoyance, and felt his fingers working their way past his lips and pressing against his fangs as if he meant to pry Louis’ teeth open- or break them. His other palm wrapped itself around Louis’ jaw and gripped it by the joints, applying a terrible pressure and forcing his mouth open as Louis tensed every muscle in his body with his effort to resist. When he felt those too-smooth fingertips find his tongue, Louis yelled, wordless and broken. He felt the gold Rolex clack against his teeth, and then the first gush stained his tongue and it was all over. Louis, ecstatic, had lost. 

Rhoshamandes was syrup-thick, older than anything he’d ever had and five times as electric; the blood seemed to spark against the heat of his lips. Distantly he felt the iron grip on his head fading away. His entire body had become animated solely towards the fount which poured from that wrist- Louis could feel himself pressing his mouth to the wound as close as he could- almost sinking his fangs into the flesh to steady himself. His right hand was scrabbling against that heavy forearm, trying to draw it closer. Somewhere he heard laughter, and vaguely Louis knew Rhosh was laughing at his desperation, and what was left inside of him that was intact and conscious loathed Rhoshamandes and his body and himself. 

But there was very little left. 

From the moment that red had met his mouth there was nothing but the blood; _he_ was nothing but the blood. It moved hotly down his throat and settled in his stomach, burning against his insides and filling Louis with warmth. His body’s only purpose was as conduit for that which flowed through him, feeding the eternity of his hunger and making him more than whole. His heart was hammering in his ears, and he tried to slow himself; to find the beat of Rhoshamandes’ pulse and follow it into the depths of him, to be led along by the thread of it until their heartbeats were one. 

He was receding from what little part of his consciousness remained into the taste of a thousand lives, a million mortals dead down the drain of this endless thirst. If this was even half of what it had been like to drink from the Fount he could understand how it had driven Lestat mad. The context was just too massive: Rhoshamandes’ soul was a hall of mirrors which went on forever. And beneath it all was that undertone that Louis had first tasted, all those years ago, in Lestat; that bitterness which he knew was in Allessandra’s blood and Eleni’s, Everard, Notker and Magnus- Benedict- himself. That poison named pain which had tainted their blood from some contamination in the deep well of history, some trauma which had occurred so long ago, under such an ancient sky, that that Louis couldn’t even recognize the stars. 

A memory of his refracted through Rhosh- Louis a child so young that it was the French sun pouring in through their French windows. He was following the trace of his father’s finger down the line of their ancestry in the crumbling family bible, but it was not his mortal ancestry, it was the immortal one, and Rhoshamandes was his father, and every name scrawled down the tree had been signed by its bearer in blood. 

He was overflowing from the inside; his identity diluted, paling into nothingness. He couldn’t imagine taking any more- he would die if he took any more- he _couldn’t stop_. The barriers of Louis’ self had stretched thin around the blood and he wanted that stretch to go on infinitely. He never _wanted_ to stop. He pulled, pulled at that ancient vein as a wave tugging at the shore and beating the land into erosion. Attached to that wrist there was no fear, no pain or fight- not a single empty place inside him; not a space in his veins not beaming with light. 

He felt that wrist try to draw back from his mouth and faintly, Louis knew that he was gripping Rhosh so hard that his ragged nails cut red crescents into his stone skin. And he was weeping; sobbing, actually, whole and desperate. He heard Rhosh make a noise of pain. He pulled and Louis pulled back, and when he yanked, Louis yanked back and sunk his teeth hard into the healing gash of Rhoshamandes’ wrist. Rhosh hissed and with a sudden wrench he tore his wrist from Louis’ mouth, skin ripping on the points of his fangs, and to Louis the loss was an utter void like someone had ripped every vein from his body at once. 

He wailed wholeheartedly- hearing himself sobbing _no no no more more more-_ and grasped blindly for Rhoshamandes’ forearm. Rhosh jerked away from his grasp, and quite suddenly the bloody palm of his hand shoved hard against Louis’ face and Louis rolled off of the bed in a limp tangle of limbs. 

He hit the ground heavy, his skull bouncing off the (luckily) carpeted floor. He could barely see or hear; the smell and taste of the blood still ruled his senses. Suddenly, reflexively, Louis gasped for breath and began to cough, choking on an inhalation of that too-thick blood. He was on his hands and knees. He watched, dazed, as a thick drop dribbled from his parted lips to the rug. Not knowing which of theirs it was, it occurred insanely to Louis to lick it off the carpet and find out; surely if it was Rhosh’s it would be worth it.

He heard a low groan from above him, on the bed. It was almost like pain. But it was not pain. Rhosh uttered some interjection which was incomprehensible to Louis- some dialect of Greek he had never heard of which the only translatable aspect was the slur of lust. And then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and followed Louis to the floor, shoving him roughly on to his back. Louis’ body obeyed easily as Rhoshamandes crawled atop him with the urgency of a man who, defeated by pleasure, is reduced to the pursuit of his own pleasure to its end.

He gripped Louis’ wrists brutally, numbing his sweaty palms; but Louis was broken open, his soul spilled across the sheets and dripping down to the carpet, and in his present state pain was just one more overwhelm to which he eagerly yielded. Rhosh pressed down atop him as if he’d fuse their bodies together- as if he wanted to be inside him; and in a brief moment of mad desperation Louis wished Rhoshamandes would just fuck him like they were men. Undeniably it would be better. Louis felt the blood burning inside him and he knew that _the worst_ had already occurred. He would rather have given his body than taken Rhosh’s blood. Louis groaned, an incoherent, broken sound, absolved of the shame of submission only by his inability to do anything else at all.

He was completely undone. Rhosh buried his face in Louis’ throat, shoving his cheek into the carpet which reeked of must and old blood. A knee got between Louis’ thighs, and their legs tangled together, Louis’ calves wrapping around his. They were _both_ desperate. Rhosh was kissing up his neck, muttering in that ancient Greek Louis had never heard, growling in his throat as he bore down on him. His voice had changed completely from that man Louis had spoken with in the little library, all those eons ago. It seemed there was very little of whatever man Rhoshamandes had been left; all that remained was this starving beast. Or perhaps the man in the library had been a well-practiced act. 

“You’re beautiful,” Rhosh rasped, in that guttural register, that inhuman tone which tended to compel weaker blood-drinkers to flee or fawn- and the urgent hunger seemed the real Rhoshamandes, full of desire and desperation, hatred and lust and love. “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” he repeated, his terrible voice trembling like he couldn’t believe what he had; as if he had forgotten himself in the raw pleasure of ravaging that beauty which had betrayed him. 

His hands shook with the exertion of restraint as he pulled his hot lips from Louis’ neck. Louis’ heart skipped and picked up again as Rhoshamandes once more brought his blood-smeared wrist to his own mouth. His fangs clacked against the Rolex and, in a moment of frustration, he ripped the metal band with his teeth. Rhosh spit it aside and bit deeply into his own flesh; Louis smelled him again and was salivating for it. Rhoshamandes shoved his face aside to lick the drying blood from his throat and growled “you’re _beautiful,_ ” against his skin. Louis heard the echo of Lestat saying those same words to him, _you’re beautiful_ ; and both ways it sounded like a curse. 

And then Rhoshamandes was inside him both ways again, fang in his vein and wrist in his mouth, and Louis was in howling harmony with his body as he never was. There was no room in his body for himself, his own soul; no room for anything inside him but Rhosh’s blood and there never would be again. It was the opposite of detachment. He was nothing but his body handled by the hands of this man, nothing but the fulfillment of his own desire and how much he wanted to fulfill desire; nothing but the places where, skin on skin, blood to tongue, their bodies became the same. 

Every artery sang. Their hearts slid into sync and became the beating bass to that endless rhythm of power-and-acceptance, thirst-and-quenching, push-and-pull. He heard Rhosh mutter around a mouthful of him _you’re beautiful_ and he wanted to hear it again and again, as he had always wanted to hear Lestat say it. _How_ Louis had always wanted to fall before a desire in which he would become nothing but the fulfillment. _You’re beautiful_ , the _wanting_ of him, the desperate ache- how sometimes in those nights in New Orleans Louis would have done anything to know Lestat wanted him, needed him, hungered for him- any shameful thing. A thousand red beds, a thousand bitten wrists, a thousand red-silk sheets and the patterns beneath, and his hand on the back of Louis’ neck, and the blood in his mouth, blood pouring where he’d been virgin torn-open. Rhoshamandes’ grip tightened on his wrists and the tiny bones of Louis’ hands cracked under his iron fingers. They were both burning up, skin hot as mortals’, Louis sweating like he’d boil right out of his flesh.

He was pulling aside a veil of red silk on a scene, interior: a rosewood bed. He did not know which life was his own. He felt the vampire beneath him struggling, felt the sweet satisfaction of his fangs sinking into his throat, and it was Benedict; Benedict on this bed, young and flushed and human, Benedict the monk who had prayed for goodness and had wept like a child the first time Rhosh entered him. Benedict writhing in silk sheets under the weight of his much-older lover, fangs in his throat, Rhosh's long fingers against his pulse, crushing Louis' wrists; how when he’d been made Benedict had cried and Rhoshamandes had held him and told him he had _nothing to fear ever again, you were made for this. You were made for me and you are perfect and you will be perfect for me forever and never again should you fear having to be any other thing._

And then it was Lestat as it had always been, and he was on fire, burning from the inside out, liquid light pouring into Louis’ mouth and over his hands, light soaking white silk and making it glow brilliant red. His lips moved hungrily against Rhoshamandes’ wrist and he caught himself mumbling a slurred litany of nonsense-French into the wound, half _please please please_ , half _no no no_ . There was almost a lucid moment in which the horror broke through: but the incessant flow beat it back. He was full of glory, filled up with that beautiful, consuming heat, full of nothing but light and he didn’t _want_ to stop- he _never_ wanted to stop- never _be anything again_. Louis hadn’t been fucked this good since the last time he died. 

Rhosh moaned against his throat, murmuring something he could _almost_ understand- could _almost_ grasp if he searched in the blood for the meaning of the words. It seemed he was so absorbed in the _feeling_ of Louis that he could not think of Louis himself at all. And when he ripped his teeth from Louis’ throat, Louis moaned at the absence of him; but it was only for Rhosh to flip him belly-down on the carpet. Then Rhoshamandes fell on him again, wrenched Louis’ head back at a cruel angle and bit hard into his artery from behind. Louis _keened_ , beyond himself, uncaring, willing to do anything; and as Rhosh took his fill of him Louis slid into the sky of another world 

In a world where this was not happening, none of it had ever happened. Maybe if Daniel Molloy had never turned to see him; maybe if the way those violet eyes glinted in the barlights had not made Louis ache for something long-gone. Or maybe if the boy had simply bled to death, nameless and briefly beloved, in that room on Divisadero. So many routes that all lead to a world where the Chateau still rotted, where Lestat had not risen and Louis not been his necromancer. A gentler world, where Louis floated in the floodwaters of death, having summoned the courage years ago and had no blonde God to save him from his own burning undoing. 

But the truth was that Louis had been marked with evil from the night Lestat first lay his hands on him. He had belonged to this blood since that first moment on the stone steps of Pointe du Lac, all those years ago, when Louis had selfishly decided that he didn’t want to die. 

He had seen the light of immortal life and reached for it. _He had said yes_. And yet he had pretended for years that the choice _to live_ had not been his. Of course he missed the sun. But never enough to give up the beauty of the night. The darkness did not _call_ Louis’ name; it howled it hymnal, embraced him and whispered that terrible secret: _you belong, you belong, you belong_ **_here_ **.

He was broken open and unwhole, sliding into the void of blind submission, unsure of who was draining him, unsure of who he was himself. They had blended together in the ouroboros alchemy of hunger. Did it matter who he was as long as he was where he _ought to be_? Yielding had always been so easy for him, in the end. To not have to struggle any longer; to succumb to pain and pleasure and all evil- in some way, wasn’t that what he had always wanted? In the cavern of his all-opened mind he heard a voice from what seemed a millennia ago echoing the words _loved by death, loved by death._ Louis always had been. His whole body sang with the consummation. 

Finally he was nothing but his body, balanced there on the edge between living and dying- the ribbon pulled out of Louis’ body through his throat and returned to him through that wrist, just glorious drawn-out suspension. His back was lifted off the floor and he could feel a shoulder, bearing down on him, and when the source of blood was severed from his lips Louis’ voice cracked and he moaned Lestat’s name in a broken keening hymn, eyes wide open, seeing nothing. 

Rhosh kissed him to shut him up and they tasted themselves in each others’ mouths, and Louis laughed against his tongue and bit down and drank deep of him and tasted his hatred; and all his rage and grief and desperation. How badly Rhosh had wanted Benedict’s pliable boyish limbs and sugarsweet blood and how cheap Louis was to him, like a bad, bitter wine you can’t stop drinking- a quick fuck whose blood sickened him like a Sunday-morning hangover, full of miserable sweat and regret. He tasted how much Rhoshamandes hated him, and how desperate he was in the moment for him; how ruined by Louis he’d been and how beautiful he thought he was. Like how, all those years ago when Armand had said of the Theatre- _a weak vampire is feared, they can tell there is something wrong with you_ \- and Louis had looked out over all those black eyes and seen a loathing that was equal parts repulsion and desire; and Louis was laughing with a mouthful of blood, gasping as Rhosh pulled out and slammed his head back against the carpet, hard. 

His brain rattled in his skull for what seemed the thousandth time. Louis laughed and a gush of blood spilled from his mouth, and he was laughing when his limp body was thrown to the bed, still laughing when Rhosh climbed atop him; and he kept laughing only to gag when his head lolled over to the side and with no warning whatsoever Louis vomited up every bit of blood in his stomach.

~~**\---** ~~

The carpet was very, very red. Louis’ vision swam. And then abruptly he vomited a second time. When he looked up at Rhoshamandes, with his dripping lips and bloodstained teeth and his third concussion of the evening, Louis laid his eyes upon the face of total defeat and choked out a final wet and broken laugh.

~~**\---** ~~

He sat with his back against the headboard, the comforter wrapped around his shoulders. He had not seen before that its sand-red silk was imprinted with a pattern of burnt-in roses. He could see his clothes not far-away, hanging from the hearth; and now that the flames beat healthily and had for some time, he knew they were probably dry. But Louis was not thinking of dressing. He was not thinking of much at all. 

A curious and somehow-familiar detachment had been laid across him like a quilt. He was looking at his limply-hanging sweater, at the room, with a burning, empty stare. He was thinking that everything _was_ a little clearer, that the world was crisper; he raised his hand absently and looked quietly down at the white back of it. The veins, making quick work of what little of Rhoshamandes’ ancient blood had remained in them, pulsed in his vivid perception. 

Louis felt the fresh lobotomy of trauma as if someone had burned a brand into his brain and he could not think while he waited for it to cool. He could only consider objective things: when one thinks so rationally and immediately that it is completely irrational. Rhoshamandes had left him in bed after licking the bruises from his throat, stalking out somewhere into the rest of the castle for a change of clothes. Louis’ white button-down, having been covered by the silk robe, was unharmed but for a few popped buttons and a few smears of red; but Rhosh had soaked the collar of his own shirt and the sleeves of his dressing-gown rather thoroughly in Louis’ blood, and could not stand to have his raiment so sullied.

Louis did not know how alert he was until the creaking of the oak door startled him suddenly and his stomach clenched. For a moment he thought he might vomit again. But all signs of his concussion- or concussions- had disappeared. He supposed what he had managed to keep down had healed his bruised skull thoroughly, as Rhosh’s blood-tinged spit had healed all the burst vessels and little tears in his throat. 

Rhosh had changed into a long, soft black garment of sharp edges: a thoroughly modern-cut wool robe of a far more structured and stylish design than wool robes were ever intended to have. His boots _thumped_ , muffled by the carpet, as he came to sit on the edge of the bed with his back to Louis. He sagged over his spread legs, an elbow on each knee, firm jaw set as he stared ahead with a strange iron sullenness in his gaze.He was different in no way: any effect Louis’ blood might have on any other vampire did nothing to Rhoshamandes besides leaven the flush upon his cheek. But there was no brightness in his eyes. His stony face was as dead as a bygone era. Louis could feel his own body changing, rewritten from the inside-out from even just that tiniest remaining contact with another eternity; but what had changed Louis perhaps visibly, had no effect on Rhosh at all. 

He sat in his forward-facing slump looking intently at the wall, and Louis leaned back against the headboard with the comforter wrapped around him, feeling the trickles of his own blood drying slowly on his collarbones. Finally, Rhoshamandes spoke. He didn’t turn to look at Louis. The effect of his deep, level voice was different, now, a sort of reverb throughout Louis’ flesh, like the blood inside him hummed along with the rhythm of its source. 

“I don’t like it,” he began, low and quiet. “Being a character in your books. I do not like it.”

Louis watched him with a patient, cool attention. He knew he _should_ be dreading whatever would come next; but he simply watched with the calm that comes when the worst has already occurred. Rhosh didn’t turn. He hissed through his teeth, and dropped his eyes from the wall.

“Actually,” he said; “I always hated it.”

And then he sighed, long and low, and pressed his palm to his forehead. “But _he_ loved it. He _longed_ for it; he was eager to provide you with material for the construction of your romances because he had always yearned to be a part of them. He wanted, so badly,” Rhosh exhaled heavily, “to be _included._ ”

Rhoshamandes rested his face, turned downwards, in his hand. His voice had become low, like a confession.

“But I never liked it,” he continued quietly. “I only let him say such things to you because... he wanted to be a character. It was important to him, somehow. I never understood it.” Louis heard him grimace. “But it made him... very happy.”

He had covered his face with his palm and he sat turned away from Louis. His voice was muffled by his hand. But Louis could hear the strain in his tone when Rhoshamandes muttered: “He said he wanted the world to _see us_.”

And here he paused. And slowly, he raised his head, and did look up. He turned to Louis and Louis met his eyes. They saw each other very evenly. Louis watched Rhosh’s gaze slide from his face to the comforter around his shoulders, down over his body, with almost no expression at all. 

He reached for something past the dresser and Louis subdued a flinch at the sudden movement. It was a pale-blue handkerchief rimmed in white lace. He held Louis’ look, leaned forward, and carefully began to dab at the drying blood on Louis’ clavicle.

Louis did not resist, and he tried not to stiffen too much. He was sure Rhoshamandes could read every tenseness. But he did- very deliberately- turn his face away. 

Rhosh laughed quietly, under his breath, but he was thinking of something and someone else. He dabbed the edge of the handkerchief to his tongue and brought the dampened cloth back to Louis’ neck as he talked.

“He used to tell me,” he chuckled, “‘‘Rhosh, we have such a story. _Such a tale to be told!_ And there are _these people_ who want to hear it.’” 

Louis’ throat was tight; he wasn’t sure if it was proximity or the eerie, spot-on mimicry of those specific pleading tones he had heard not forty-eight hours ago from the mouth they actually belonged to. 

Rhosh snorted softly. “And he would tell it to me, our story,” he smiled to himself, flaking blood from the soft curve behind Louis’ ear. “ _How_ he would tell it.” He swiped a smear off Louis’ jaw and Louis grit his teeth. “How he dramatized every detail of our lives to weave a tale _worth telling._ ” Putting the kerchief aside, Rhosh sat back. He blinked as if remembering where he was; his gaze strayed around them, to the tester of the four-poster, the red drapes. 

“He would sit on this bed…” he continued, softly. And his eyes drifted about as if mapping the perimeter of its enclosure. “And he would paint such pictures of us. He enfolded together the events of our lives as if they had narrative and meaning, like drawing constellations from those points of light in the sky.” 

Rhoshamandes’ seemed to study the details of the room like he was remembering- or memorizing- them. Casting his gaze down to the silk comforter and running his hand over it tenderly, Rhosh laughed to himself. His eyes followed the trail of fabric to Louis’ shoulders, then to his face. He smiled suddenly to himself, bemused, and Louis knew it had nothing to do with him at all. 

"And I would say,” Rhoshamandes laughed, “Benedict, there is no connection between these things, there is no _meaning_ \- there is no _narrative_ to these events- our lives simply go on and on. We live; we live forever. Isn’t that enough?’”

His eyes dropped again to his lap. “But he insisted. A tale for every night. In France… in that old world.” He trailed off, and for a moment his expression was mortal: pure sorrow. 

Louis moved aside as Rhosh came up beside him, reclining himself in the bower of pillows with his back to the headboard, legs extended, ankles crossed. He leaned his head back like he was stretching his neck and stared beyond the timeworn tester, beyond the red silk, beyond the ceiling.

“He had a meaning for each of us,” Rhosh continued, quieter. “A mythology for each addition to our Coven.” His voice had dropped whisper-soft. “You would have thought Allessandra was Helen, Eleni an Oracle of Delphi,” his head rolled languidly to look at Louis, who calmly met the ache in those ancient eyes. “From the way he told it, you would have thought I was God.”

Rhosh was looking past him. Louis found himself able to closely study his face as he had not before, to see the subtle changes in it; those brushstrokes of pain and humor, memory, love. His smooth stony countenance was painted in the micro-expressions of truly ancient blood-drinkers, in so much color and feeling that from afar it seemed flat- only revealing its shifting, vivid sensitivities in close study. Rhoshamandes’ brow furrowed. Then he blinked and was shaken from his reverie; he seemed to _see_ Louis again.

“But he never told those stories,” he began again, bitterly. “I am sure he was never asked. Your Lestat only recorded those ugly things of relevance, and so he was told only the simple, brittle things; the recent things; all those paltry,” a curl came to his lip, “germane _significances_. Nothing that mattered. Only…” He sighed pensively. “Only what was _true_.”

Rhosh looked away, tense. His body had drawn itself in tight, limbs all curved in, shoulders hunched. If Louis had not so recently been made potently aware of his size and strength, he would seem almost small. 

Then he exhaled audibly. It seemed the sound of letting something go. He still did not look at Louis. He watched his own hand, which picked absently at a worn part of the comforter. 

“He painted pictures of us worth _looking at,_ is what I am saying. He used the brightest paints- the most _vital_ words. And in those words- in him-” Rhosh furrowed his brow- “I was reflected. It was through his vision of me that I became able to see myself. He held up a mirror to the vast interior of my heart.” 

He was far-away. Louis watched Rhoshamandes’ hand close loosely into a fist when he muttered: “He wanted to _know me_.”

Rhosh shifted against him and looked up at Louis- for his posture had so sunken that he had to tilt his head upwards. His eyes were not like ice, not at all like fire. His eyes were the miserable pale-blue of dishwater. 

“And now… without him. I cannot see myself at all. I have no reflection. I look for myself,” he glanced down, loosely gesturing at the length of his own body, “and find I simply am not there.”

For a moment Louis was struck with a very clear image. It kept happening, now, that he knew things about Rhosh without having to know them; that uncomfortable intimacy of the blood-bond which is almost, in the immediate aftermath, like a psychic link. But Louis knew that he was merely evoking images he had seen in Rhoshamandes’ blood and not recognized, as one recalls hours later the partial fragment of a dream. 

For instance: he knew now that the only destruction which Rhoshamandes had effected in this apartment had been that of the rosewood bedroom-set. Much had been Sevraine- but even more carnage had been wrought by Benedict. They had fought terribly before he left. Louis could recall it like it was his own memory. 

And as if it were his own memory, now, he recalled that very-clear image. Vividly Louis saw the sea, and heard the great beating of its waves; and he saw a child standing on a stony island bluff and staring out over the great black nighttime waters, a child on the Isle that would not be Crete for another two millennia looking out at those lights in the sky that, five-thousand years ago, humanity did not yet know were stars. 

And then Rhosh’s hard jaw found its pride again and tightened. He turned from Louis and slid down the pillows so that Louis sat up next to his head, and folded his arms across his chest- that old coffin habit every single vampire who has ever lived eventually develops. He closed his eyes slowly. Louis watched him exhale with mute attention. 

There was a silence that was longer even than other silences: the kind of silence that comes after the end. Louis sat in it comfortably.

“I remember...” Rhoshamandes finally said, soft and low. He did not open his eyes. “I remember what we called the first constellations, you know. I lived there in Babylon when they named the stars in the sky.”

He raised his lowered lids and stared up through the bed, through the ceiling, through the castle, to the sky. “But the Heavens were different then. I recall the names of stars which do not exist anymore; stars that burned out in the desert night over Ur before there was alphabet to record them. And to think…” He blinked slowly, deliberately. “To think that I am the only one who remembers them. All those lights lost so far back in darkness, it is like they were never seen at all.

“I think,” continued Rhoshamandes quietly, “to burn so bright, for so long, and to not be remembered- even for how one burns-” His eyes moved over the pockmarked wood above them as if he were reading, lost in thought, in time and meaning. “I think it is worse than death. Surely immolation is inevitable. But to be forgotten, to never be named in history… is a far greater tragedy than simply to burn out.” 

He had shifted his gaze away and was looking again at the wall. The words hung in the air, luminescent. 

“Why,” asked Louis, “are you telling me this?”

Rhosh’s head turned on the pillow to face him, and when his eyes finally met Louis’ there was nothing in them that was not cold and long-dead.

“Because if you don’t listen,” he said softly, “I’ll kill you."

“I mean,” he continued before Louis could open his mouth, “I will make you suffer. You do not know suffering. You fear torture so much more than death? You do not know torture.” His voice was as quiet as grave-dirt. His hands remained clasped on his chest; he watched Louis steadily from the pillow, no feeling in his tone at all. “I tell you these things because you are a captive audience, and if you do not listen to me I will _show you what suffering means._ That is simply it.”

Rhosh looked away and Louis tried not to think too loud when he thought _I hope he gets to write you out._

Instead he let his gaze be occupied by the destroyed furniture of the room, the rosewood set which he had seen Rhoshamandes deliberately destroy in the Kaleidoscope eye of the blood. The desk and the chairs, the nightstand- all these things were very, very old. Benedict had torn through the apartment in a screaming match. But it was Rhosh who had come, after the fact, to destroy what was in this room with a systematic deliberacy. 

Rhosh was still looking up at the pockmarked tester. It seemed he was reading the years in its damage. Then, slowly, he pulled himself up, and sat with his back against the headboard, adjusting. It seemed he was returning to his body after some brief excursion out of it. 

Then he turned to Louis, and smiled grimly and asked: “Do you know how old this bed is?”

“No,” replied Louis evenly.

“ _I turned him on this bed,_ ” said Rhoshamandes.

Louis’ stomach rolled as he looked around the room at the shattered remains of a thousand-year-old bridal suite, a thousand-year marriage, a thousand-year world which in the course of a few hours had been blown to smithereens. But of course that practical understanding of what had occurred here was not actually true. No world is brought to apocalypse in a moment. When one looks beyond the ballistics there is always that slow fuse, which burned and burned for a very long time. 

“Did you ever ask?” Inquired Louis, not turning to address Rhosh. 

“Ask what?” he replied, without addressing Louis.

“Why it was so important to him,” replied Louis, staring straight ahead above the center of the hearth, at the square frame in which hung that pretty rose, pressed in glass. “To be _seen_. To be included.”

There was a long quiet pause in which neither of the men laid eyes upon each other and both thought of the others’ face. 

“I did not think,” said Rhoshamandes, finally, “that I could have ever understood.”

Louis pressed his lips together and hummed a soft acknowledgement. 

They sat in silence. And then:

“It is good,” Louis started, softly, “that you do not like being a character in Lestat’s novels. Too many people like it _too_ much.”

Rhosh snorted a quiet laugh, and Louis drew his legs up to fold them beneath himself. He turned to look at the man who sat behind him and drew his eyes over the strange sadness of Rhoshamandes’ grand and blood-flushed profile. Then Louis ventured, with a small smile: “And you are very different from your character.”

This time Rhoshamandes turned to look at Louis. His eyes glinted in the low light. Louis did not know when the light had become low; his vision so unsteady for so long that he was not sure when almost all the candles had gone out. 

“Oh?” replied Rhosh, a lilt of amusement in his voice. He was doing a good job of _pretending_ to humor Louis. But really, he wanted to know. “How so?”

“Well,” said Louis, “he’s funnier.” It just slipped out. 

Rhosh smiled a wide, humorless smile that was all fang, and Louis’ recently-healed throat felt a phantom pain in the shape of those teeth. “And you,” he replied, grinning flatly, “are far more foolish.”

Louis frowned. Briefly he glanced down, to collect his actual thoughts. And then he said: 

“None of us are like the characters in Lestat’s books, Rhosh. They are myths written for monsters, and no-one is his fairytale self. We all turn back into frogs and pumpkins and blundering murderers outside the pages of his stories.”

It seemed genuine humor passed across Rhoshamandes’ face this time. “But I do think,” he said, “that I am particularly distant.” His eyes rolled around, again, to look at Louis’ from the corners of them. “At least more than you, certainly. I think he enjoys portraying your infirmities.”

Louis felt his mouth twitch. He made his mind quiet and replied: “Lestat does not know you very well. He is a poor source to capture your,” and this time his mouth twitched in the other direction, “ _charms_.”

Rhoshamandes did not seem to hear the sour note in Louis genial, soft-spoken tone; or he wasn’t paying attention. “That he is,” he hummed in response.

“His depiction of you,” Louis continued lightly, is translated from more primary sources. He did his best, truly, to paint a sympathetic portrayal over the sketch of you that was produced by Benedict.”

Rhoshamandes stiffened. His expression became cold, and his eyes opened into slits- pupils alighting on Louis from the corner of his profile with a sudden antipathy. Louis smiled a small, knowing smile as he replied to the unspoken: 

“Oh, but Lestat put a great deal of effort into seeking information about someone of whom he knew so little. He worried often about offending a potential friend.”

“I cannot conceive the foolishness,” rumbled Rhosh, with an audible bitterness, “of thinking he ever possessed the potential of my friendship. His attempts at secondhand understanding are poor.”

“I don’t know,” replied Louis airily, “I think he did a fine job with such a biased text. The picture drawn of you in the novels is constructed entirely from descriptions given by those who knew and loved you.”

Rhoshamandes pulled himself up suddenly, straightening his back against the headboard; he was taller than Louis again and Louis resisted the urge to shrink back into the pillows and avert his gaze. There was a hardness in Rhoshamandes’ look when he flatly said: “The language in which _we_ knew each other was untranslatable. You do not know the depth of your own misrepresentations.”

“The depiction came simply,” fired Louis back, “from how you _are seen_. But I have spent such an _enlightening_ hour with you, Rhoshamandes, and I have begun to think that Lestat wrote you with too much projection on his own part. He does not truly understand you at all.” They were inches apart. Louis looked directly into the coldfire of his eyes. 

“There are facets of you,” he said, “which are out of the realm of Lestat’s experience. But I understand you now. You have shown yourself to me most clearly.” And before Rhoshamandes could open his mouth Louis continued on to the unspoken: “From one coward to another, Rhosh, _I have seen the depths of your soul and there is not much there worth writing about._ ”

Louis, so newly attuned to the subtleties of Rhoshamandes’ expressions, had been watching the slow twist of his face with a nasty satisfaction which it seemed he had not felt in centuries. 

“I will k-”

“You’ll kill me, yes,” Louis interjected evenly. “You’ve told me that. But I don’t think you want to. You know, I’m very familiar with this routine. You have never wanted to kill me; you just want me to listen to you talk.”

The detachment in Louis’ brain had crystallized into something hard and sharp. His voice had grown thoughtful as he stared into Rhosh’s eyes; watched the flickers of rage cross his face and recognized it for the ancient fear it was. “You know, I don’t care about any of this- pride or power or _politics_. I never have. You still do not understand that _you have chosen the wrong person._ But you know that a decent fight would bruise your pride. And,” Louis snorted, “your pride really is _all you have left._

“You do not like your character? Fine.” Louis bit back the coldness in his voice, lowering it to a more intimate tone. “But know that he is the best of you. He is a reflection cast by the mirrors of those who were closest to you, Rhosh; comic, fearful, _venal_. Everything in those books,” Louis said, low and sweet and with devastating tenderness writ across his soft expression, “came from the mouths of those who _loved_ you. _Imagine how you must seem to me._ ”

And he held Rhoshamandes’ gaze. And Rhosh, stymied, stared at Louis with all the fine lines of his five-thousand-year-old face filled with anger; with the terrified, miserable guilt at the heart of him; and for the first time in the night he looked into Louis’ eyes and really, _really_ saw him. 

With utter hatred in his voice, Rhoshamandes drawled: “I don’t know what game you think you’re playing.”

And Louis _laughed_. It was a sudden, barking laugh, unlike him; surprising both of them. Rhosh’s mouth twitched, and suddenly Louis could not stop. He didn’t even cover his mouth: it was a fit and he let it come, bending at the waist as he watched Rhoshamandes’ face curdle with anger. Through the bond of their blood, Louis felt the deep loathing of him- the impotent fear; and when Louis saw himself reflected through the eye of Rhoshamandes’ mind he laughed even harder because he saw that for a moment he looked like Lestat.

The remaining flames of the myriad candles flickered along with Louis’ laughter, as if a breeze was blowing through; but they both knew well that there were no windows in this apartment. And so it seemed for a moment that the whole room and all the flames of Saint Rayne were laughing along with him. 

“Isn’t it funny?” Louis hissed through a grin rarely grinned. He looked up at Rhoshamandes’ and saw loathing, pure loathing. “ _No one ever does_.”

He knew Rhosh’s intent before he felt the hands on his face, cradling his jaw; hands that slid down to wrap around his neck. Louis met Rhosh’s determined stare and smiled and thought: _Prove me right._

Louis’ neck twisted. He heard two soft _pops_ and then a deafening a _crunch_. He thought briefly of how simple it was to shame a strong monster with an easy death, and went gladly into the dark.

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

_pop pop_ **CRUNCH**. When Louis awoke, it was Lestat who told him that Rhosh was dead.

But Fareed's had been the first face he'd seen. Gabrielle was there, too, and Marius; and others. The tomb was filled with the soft sounds of relief, laughter a small celebration and Louis did not know what they were celebrating. Finally it occurred that it was probably him. He could feel his brain tuning into the proper input again like a faulty radio. He hadn’t been dead, exactly; Louis knew what death was like and that had not been it. But he’d been without feedback or feeling, buried deep inside his own body, in a place without heat or dreams. 

The darkness called, but it wasn’t the darkness of death- just sleep, mortal sleep, so that when Louis felt himself being weightlessly lifted from the iron coffin he was too tired to resist. He heard the beating of a too-strong heart. Those familiar hands on his face had been rendered unfamiliar by the reek of now too-familiar blood, and he stiffened. But it was just Lestat, finally, who carried him from the tomb; Lestat, frazzled and exhausted and smeared with tears, laughing with the hysteria of relief; Lestat who was alive, somehow, Lestat who somehow seemed just a little older now. 

Louis had relaxed into his embrace. He felt the softness of the velvet jacket on his cheek, his own cashmere sweater which, at some point, had been returned to him; he felt the hot blood in Lestat’s palms. His blonde hair cascaded around Louis’ face, rendering Louis’ still-blurry vision a swarm of fractal gold.

And under the intimate scent of Lestat there was that undertone; that hot blood in Lestat’s veins that smelled, somewhere within the deluge, _like him_. He would smell _like him_ forever. And there were bigger horrors to be confronted, a whole horrible world of them, but first there was sleep and then there would be celebration. Somewhere in the spectacle, Louis knew, he would have to figure out how to keep truth and consequence from meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to my darling beloved beta, without whose edits and encouragement this would have never been completed. Big thanks to Anne, too, whose trauma sandbox I traveled to the absolute depths of in writing this; and of course to those reading. If you got this far, you've only yourself to blame.
> 
> During the course of its long, long beta, this fic was called 'Lonesome Operatist Rapes Page-Turner' after the Dresden Dolls song of nearly the same name; in final edit its alternate title was SCHEHERAZADE REVERSE.


End file.
